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luded. Although the intelligibility of the speakers’ production was showed tohave relation to all the three aspects, it was showed that the three aspects did not havethe same importance in affecting comprehension. When speaking rate was fast,intelligibility was found to be more affected by prosodic deviance. In a more recentstudy, Flege (1995) studied the degree of the accent of Mandarin speakers’ productionof English. In this study, low-pass filtered English speech was used. It was found thatnon-segmental factors such as speaking rate, reduction and pitch patterns lead to thedetected foreign accent in Mandarin speakers’ production and that their foreign accentcan be perceived only on the basis of the suprasegmental information.There have been plenty of acoustic researches on the phonetic production ofEnglish, and it is believed that after the critical period, second language learners notonly have difficulty in articulating segments of L2, but also have difficulty inaccurately acquiring suprasegmental features of L2 (Flege, 1987; Pittam & Ingram,1992; Chun, 1982; Guion et al., 2000). Therefore, negative transfer at suprasegmentallevel may greatly hinder comprehensibility of L2 speech and impede communication.

Chapter 2 Literature Review

Suprasegmental properties, including stress, play a significant role in L2acquisition. They are shown to be closely related to foreign accent perceived in L2production and to difficulties in L2 perception. It is possible that the influence of L1lies in the difference between L1 and L2 in the different employment of relevantphonetic correlates. Thus, in analyzing the possible influence of Chinese learners’ L1tonal background on their production of English stress, we should refer to the acousticcorrelates of stress and tone.In this chapter, I first elaborate on some relevant theories of L2 learning inSection 2.1. In Section 2.2, a detailed comparison is presented concerning the acousticfeatures used in English stress, Chinese tone and Changsha dialect. Section 2.3 reviewsthe studies exploring the influence of L1 phonological system on L2 stress acquisitionand assess the inadequacy of such studies. Section 2.4 describes some researches thathave studied the acoustic correlates of L2 stress perception and production.

2.1 Relevant Theories of Second Language Learning
In this section, some relevant theories of second language learning are presented.In Section 2.1.1, a description of language transfer is presented; two models aboutspeech learning are introduced in Section 2.1.2 and Section 2.1.3.

2.1.1 Language Transfer
Lado (1957) stated that when learning a foreign language, learners widely rely ontheir own native language, and there are strong tendency for these learner to transferlinguistic forms or strategies that are related to their mother tongue.Researches on language transfer have been done since the 1950s, and the issue oflanguage transfer was firstly presented in Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH),which claims that the difficulty met in learning a second language mainly comes fromthe learner’s native language. Lado (1957) hypothesizes that the L2 categories orfeatures which are similar to those in L1 would be easy to learn; whereas those aredifferent from the counterparts in L1, would cause learning difficulty. Although thereare some criticisms about CAH, its effectiveness in predicting learning di本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。