An Experimental Study on English Majors Weak Form Productions of Prepositions

This study compares the acoustic cues Chinese English learners and American native English speakers used to realize the weak forms of prepositions. Six prepositions with the highest frequency of occurrence in COCA, “at, for, from, in, of and to”, were selected as target words, and each of them was collocated with 3 verb phrases (VP) which were further put into experimental sentences with a Subject+VP+Object+Apstructure. Altogether 6 focus conditions were set for each experimental sentence in this research. The vowel formant, duration, pitch movement of prepositions were analyzed within and across two speaker groups, from which we concluded: learners only use pitch and duration as the phonetic cues to distinguish the reduced and the normal prepositions, and the deviation might be caused by their L1 transfer. Specifically, learners' centralization is not as obvious as the native speakers in the process of vowel reduction, instead, they use the shortened Chinese vowels to realize the weak forms of prepositions. In addition, learners' duration of reduced vowel in preposition is longer than that of the native speakers, as there is no lax vowel in their L1 system, so it is difficult for them to shorten the vowels as largely as the native speakers do. Besides, learners' production of prepositions placed after the sentence nuclear is deviant from that of the native speakers in terms of pitch representation. Their pitch range is larger than the native speakers', and the clear falling trend on their pitch contour is observed within the reduced vowel, which is supposed to be caused by the transference of neutral tone features in their L1 Chinese.