Differences between English and Chinese Syllables and Its Inspiration on English Pronunciation Teaching

English and Chinese belong to different linguistic systems, so English and Chinese syllables, as the basic linguistic structure, own great differences in syllable structure, syllabification, syllable function as well as liaison. Chinese English learners are apt to have the negative transfer in English pronunciation acquisition under the influence of their mother tongue-Chinese. Therefore, only the repeated imitation and practice on the ground of theoretical contrasts and analyses can help learners speak perfect English.

An acoustic analysis of vowels in checked syllables in Chinese

Vowels in checked syllables are almost short and abrupt in Chinese Mandarin dialects. This paper proposed a parametric statistical modeling for the analysis of these vowels.The parameters were described empirically with the method of probability distribution. The effects of the multiparameter classifications were estimated by the binary and multinomial logistic models, and the method of support vector machine was adopted to carry out the pattern recognition of the classifications. The results show that the parameters of duration, DCT_（1-3）are significant to the external classification, and the parameters of DCT_（0-3） have significant main effects on the internal classification. The automatic testing shows that the hit rate of the external pattern recognition is only 43.6% but the rate is 96.1% of the internal. It indicates that the abrupt feature should be additive rather than distinctive.

Research on perception of juncturebetween syllables in Chinese

For Chinese synthesis systems that use syllables as basic units, the perception of between-syllable juncture is a matter of interest. In this paper, a two-step perception test to investigate the perception property of formani transition is presented. The first step is a set of exploring tests, from which it is found that subjects can not distinguish whether the formants of two successive syllables are transited smoothly. The second step perception test is disigned to investigate the perception of formant transitions on a more thorough environment. The stimuli of the test are disyllabic words, which cover various phonemic structures and tonal combinations. Both the average person and specialists on phonetics and speech technology are invested to be subjects. Results of the second step test are consistent with those of the flrst step. The results also show that listeners are in general not sensitive to formant transition.Yet, both segment structure and tonal variation will affect the perception of formant transition.Although listeners with phonology knowledge tend to pay more attention to formant transition than others, they still have difficulty to distinguish synthetic disyllabic words with formant transition between syllables from those without