An Analysis of the Pitch Contour of an English Declarative Question Read Aloud by Chinese EFL Learners

The pitch contour of an English declarative question read aloud by 12 Chinese EFL learners is labeled and analyzed by means of the phonetic software “praat” on the basis of the English intonation grammar proposed by Pierrehumbert. The careful study yields to two findings. 1) Most Chinese EFL learners can locate correctly the stresses of the target sentence and attach legal tonal events to the pitch accents and edge tones, but they prefer to employ non-monotonies for the pitch accents. 2) They are unable to manage the tone scaling of the pitch accents according to their strength in an IP or the proper combination of the tonal events into a pitch contour. Learners’ improper management of the tonal events for the pitch accents of the target sentence, their tone scaling and the pitch transition between two starred tones probably arises from the negative transfer of Chinese lexical tones and intonation, the severe shortage of input on English intonation grammar and their low-level skills in tone management at the declarative stage in English intonation learning. The results provide some inspiration for English intonation teaching and learning.