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speakers of English who were different in Englishproficiency. The results demonstrated that the fewer proficient subjects showed equalsensitivity to duration and intensity while the more proficient learners were moresensitive to changes in duration. Moreover, the results suggested that duration playeda less important role in intonational prominence in French than in English.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework.....17
3.1 Three Ts Theory.....17
3.1.1 Tonality......... 17
3.1.2 Tonicity......... 18
3.1.3 Tone.......19
3.2 Autosegmental-Metrical Theory....20
3.2.1 The Development of Autosegmental-Metrical Theory........20
3.2.2 To BI and IVi E.......23
Chapter 4 Methodology.....27
4.1 Research Questions........27
4.2 Subjects and Experimental Materials....27
4.3 Data Extraction......30
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion..... 33
5.1 Similarities and Differences of Prosodic Features Between theEFL Learners.........33
5.2 Possible Reasons for the Differences....61

Chapter 5 Results and Discussion

This chapter will analyze the collected data and answer the research questions.The similarities and differences of prosodic features between the EFL learners inNortheast China and the Americans will be compared and the possible reasons for thedifferences will be displayed afterwards.

5.1 Similarities and Differences of Prosodic Features Betweenthe EFL Learners in Northeast China and the AmericansTonality, according to Wells (2006), is concerned with dividing an utterance intointonational phrases(IP). Different speakers may divide the same sentence intodifferent tone units or IP based on his or her own perception of the information hiddenin the sentence. Each IP has its own prosodic features. There are four standards interms of the division of tone units, i.e., “pause, anacrusis, final syllable lengtheningand pitch reset”(Cruttenden, 1997: 29-34). The division of IP is applied under the fourstandards in the thesis.The present research makes use the dashes “/” and “//” to represent differentboundaries during the process of annotation, namely “ / ” for intermediate phraseboundaries and “//” for intonational boundaries. The pause between intermediateboundaries is relatively shorter than that between intonational boundaries. Forinstance, some Chinese EFL learners divided the original sentence as “ Don’t look for/cheap valuables// in a bank/vault//”, which means they considered the whole sentenceas two intonational phrases “Don’t look for cheap valuables” and “in a bank vault”,and further dividing the two intonational phrases into four intermediate phrases as“Don’t look for”, “cheap valuables”, “in a bank” and “vault”. The simple sentencesincluding “do” type, “please” type, “don’t” type, and “let’s” type, the compoundsentences and the tag questions produced by Northeast China EFL learners will beanalyzed one by one.

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Conclusion

This chapter will sum up the major findings of the thesis, present the implications,list the limitations and give suggestions for further study.The thesis adopts an experimental way to find out the prosodic features of Englishimperatives by Northeast Chinese students and the Americans respectively and thesimilarities and differences between them, followed by the possible reasons for thediff