Phonetic Realization Of Information Structures In Chinese English Learners’ Reading Texts

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the phonetic realization of information structure in L2, by comparing the productions of English discourse from Beijing English learners and from native English speakers. Phonetic and statistical analyses are conducted on English reading texts selected from Asian English Speech cOrpus Project (AESOP). The main findings include: Beijing English learners do not distinguish the given and new information with pitch range as native English speakers do, which is the main difference between the two speaker groups; the slight differences found on duration and mean pitch value might result from other factors rather than phonetic strategies utilized in information packaging. Besides, the difference between Beijing English learners' performance in lexical and referential levels mainly lies in the duration of accessible information.