COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TEMPORAL PROSODIC PARAMETERS IN THE SPEECH OF FOREIGN STUDENTS LEARNING THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The work examines the prosodic realization of the Bulgarian word stress in the speech of Chinese Mandarin speakers, with the aim of outlining the parameters that make the comprehensibility of their speech difficult. Instrumental phonetics methods are used and recordings of read speech are analyzed with the speech signal processing program Praat. The research is focused on the duration of the vowels as one of the acoustic ques of the word stress. To minimize the "inconsistency" of the binary division of stressed and unstressed units in connected speech (discussed in the literature), taking into account the fact that the acoustic keys of stress are subject to intonational shaping by tonal accents and boundary tones, we separately compare the duration of stressed vowels, the unstressed non-final and the unstressed final. The results show that the characteristic ratio of stressed and unstressed non-final vowels for Bulgarian language, in which the former outweigh the latter by about one and a half times, is not reached among Chinese speakers. Therefore, it is difficult to determine which vowel/syllable is stressed in their speech. The unstressed final vowels are longer than the stressed ones in both groups, which is an expected result due to the final lengthening before pause.