Nora A. Binghadeer
Riyadh University,
Saudi Arabia

An Acoustic Analysis of Pitch Range in the Production of Native and Nonnative Speakers of English

This paper investigated Saudi EFL learners' pitch range, and compared it to native speakers'. 52 female students read sentences, and their production was analysed through pitch tracks and spectrograms. The F0 of the vowels for all tokens was measured in Hz at midpoint. The results revealed that there were significant differences between the mean of the pitch range used by non-native speakers and all native speakers for the utterances with falling intonation. However, while there were no significant differences between the non-native speakers' pitch range and the American native speakers' for the utterances with rising intonation, there were significant differences between their mean and that of the British native speakers.
 

Presenter
Nora A. Binghadeer
Riyadh University,
Saudi Arabia