Influence of Syntactic Structures on the Acquisition of Wh-questions: In the case of Tianjin English Learners

Differences between English and Chinese wh-qusetions in syntax structures play a role in the acquisition of English prosody. This study focuses on the influence of two types of wh-questions, that is, wh-object questions and wh-subject questions, on the English intonation features by native speakers of American English and Tianjin EFL learners. Findings are as follows: 1) Native English speakers tend to stress the stressed syllable of the last lexical word of the sentence when producing [+do-support] wh-object questions, while English learners mostly stress on the intermediate syllables, especially the word “do”. 2) Learners locate more prominence in VP structure and produce more intonation phrases than native speakers when producing [-do-supports] wh-object questions. 3) As for wh-subject questions, learners cover all the four kinds of boundary tone patterns, of which %H-L% occupies the most, but still less than native speakers as the boundary tone of whole sentences.