This paper investigates the style-specific rhythms of Mandarin in 4 different genres using acoustic measures so as to generate more macro and micro understanding of the speech rhythms of Mandarin.It took News,Dialogue...This paper investigates the style-specific rhythms of Mandarin in 4 different genres using acoustic measures so as to generate more macro and micro understanding of the speech rhythms of Mandarin.It took News,Dialogue,Short story and Weather forecast as the different genres.All the data were natural and authentic materials downloaded from China CCTV websites and analyzed using 6 acknowledged rhythmic measurements:speech rate,%V,ΔC,VarcoC,rPVI-C and nPVI-V.The findings show that the rhythms of Mandarin in four genres all fall towards the"syllable-timed"ends of the timing continuum,demonstrating a broadly similar rhythmic pattern for Mandarin,but the four genres of Mandarin significantly differ from each other in speech rate,interval measures and pairwise variability indices,revealing the stylistic variations within the same rhythmic pattern,and that current rhythmic measurements vary in their powers in classifying stylistic rhythms of Mandarin with%V,ΔC and nPVI giving the best categorization in this study.展开更多
It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English,and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level o...It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English,and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility.However,the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial.The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain,in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings.It was found that,in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified,4 resulted from lexical semantics(22%),3 from Chinese place names(17%),3 from grammar(17%),and 11 from pronunciation(61%)(with some tokens cross-classified).The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.展开更多
基金co-funded by Project 2011wy041J from China Planning office of Philosophy and Social ScienceProject G20190214022 from China State Burenu of Foreign Experts Affairs
文摘This paper investigates the style-specific rhythms of Mandarin in 4 different genres using acoustic measures so as to generate more macro and micro understanding of the speech rhythms of Mandarin.It took News,Dialogue,Short story and Weather forecast as the different genres.All the data were natural and authentic materials downloaded from China CCTV websites and analyzed using 6 acknowledged rhythmic measurements:speech rate,%V,ΔC,VarcoC,rPVI-C and nPVI-V.The findings show that the rhythms of Mandarin in four genres all fall towards the"syllable-timed"ends of the timing continuum,demonstrating a broadly similar rhythmic pattern for Mandarin,but the four genres of Mandarin significantly differ from each other in speech rate,interval measures and pairwise variability indices,revealing the stylistic variations within the same rhythmic pattern,and that current rhythmic measurements vary in their powers in classifying stylistic rhythms of Mandarin with%V,ΔC and nPVI giving the best categorization in this study.
基金funded by State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs(project GDT20173200030&project G20190214022).
文摘It is widely accepted nowadays that intelligibility is the essential goal for most learners of English,and it is not necessary for them to mimic all aspects of native-speaker English in order to achieve a high level of intelligibility.However,the features that are needed in order to make oneself easily understood by listeners from elsewhere remain controversial.The current research focuses on thirteen five-minute recordings of conversations between young speakers of English in central China and an interviewer from Britain,in order to determine which features of their speech gave rise to misunderstandings.It was found that,in the 18 tokens of misunderstanding identified,4 resulted from lexical semantics(22%),3 from Chinese place names(17%),3 from grammar(17%),and 11 from pronunciation(61%)(with some tokens cross-classified).The most common phonological factors giving rise to loss of intelligibility were omission of syllables and simplification of word-initial consonant clusters.
