Syllable Duration and Pausing in the Speech of Chinese ESL Speakers

* Although suprasegmentals (stress, rhythm, and intonation) and pausing are very important for intelligibility (Anderson-Hsieh, 1992), the literature contains only a few acoustic studies investigating these aspects of speaking proficiency in ESL learners. Bond and Fokes (1985) investigated stress and syllable duration at the word level and found that nonnative speakers representing several language backgrounds showed less differentiation in syllable duration than did native speakers (NSs). Adams (1979) investigated rhythm and pausing at the discourse level in a linguistically heterogeneous group of ESL learners using rhymes and paragraphs as elicitation tasks. She found that the nonnative speakers in her study paused frequently and at inappropriate points in the sentence and differentiated less in duration between stressed and unstressed syllables than did native speakers. However, the studies cited above did not use an independent test to assess speaking proficiency, and they apparently investigated only one level of proficiency-intermediate to high intermediate-so the extent to which more advanced speakers acquire syllable duration and pausing is not known. The preliminary study reported here investigated syllable duration and pausing in Chinese ESL speakers, a group not investigated in the earlier studies but one that has been reported informally as having difficulties with English rhythm (Chang, 1987). We investigated both intermediate-proficiency (IP) and high-proficiency (HP) speakers because comparing such speakers with native speakers should provide information on both the difficulties that Chinese learners have with syllable duration and