Acoustic features of English sentence production for English and Chinese native speakers: Intonational and temporal patterns

Abstract

Intonation is utilized by languages in order to differently convey intention, meaning, and emotion. Chinese, a tonal language, assigns F0 formant frequencies to lexically important components within words; whereas English, a stress language, changes F0 patterns according to the speaker’s intended meaning or emotion, especially changing near the end of a phrase. As Chinese speakers produce other languages, especially a non-tonal language such as English, it is uncertain whether their intonation is the same as a native speaker. The purpose of this study is to compare intonation across Chinese and English speakers. An acoustical analysis was completed on 16 English and 32 Chinese speakers producing List 1 of the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) sentences. Preliminary results show that Chinese speakers produce sentences with longer absolute duration than English speakers. Intonation features of sentence production such as F0 contour and temporal contours, as well as temporal features of English sentences such as temporal gap and sentence and word duration will also be compared. Findings will show the effect of L1 tonal language on producing a stress language, such as English.