Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
English language--Study and teaching--Vietnamese students; English language--Intonation;
Abstract
The present study examines native English speakers' perception of English sentences reproduced by Vietnamese speakers. The work is based on the question of whether Vietnamese speakers who use tone to make lexical distinctions in their own language can reproduce syntactical and lexical distinctions in English and if native English speakers can judge these distinction so Previous experiments done on intonation, stress and tone are discussed, followed by an examination of similarities and differences between Vietnamese and English prosody. The present experiment consisted of these steps: Pilot studies were conducted to determine which sentences of contrastive intonation and stress were to be taped by a native American English speaker. Twenty-one native American English listeners judged the tape made by the native speaker. Four Vietnamese speakers reproduced those sentences. The Vietnamese reproductions were randomly ordered, then judged by fifty native American English listeners. A hierarchy of difficulty was found for judging these four speakers. The speakers were perceived as reproducing statements with the greatest accuracy, followed by compound nouns, questions and modified nouns respectively. The individual variance requires that a study of larger groups is necessary to determine tonal language influences on reproductions of English prosody by the second language learner.
Year of Submission
1982
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Carolyn Shields
Second Advisor
John Bernthal
Third Advisor
Ralph Goodman
Date Original
1982
Object Description
1 PDF file (94 leaves)
Copyright
©1982 Jolene Gear
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Gear, Jolene, "Interpretation of English Intonation and Stress Patterns Reproduced by Vietnamese Speakers" (1982). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2727.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2727
Comments
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