Abstract: The present study aims to contrast through a new approach the semantic prosody of a pair of synonyms between the native speaker and the non-native speaker, taking “affect” and “influence as an example. We analyzed the differences of the semantic prosody of the two words in the native speaker corpus (FROWN), and the learner's corpus (CLEC), in terms of the prosodic form, prosodic polarity and prosodic strength, which are the three parameters of semantic prosody. The findings are as follows. The prosodic form and prosodic polarity of “affect” are the same in FROWN and CLEC, with the posture of [negative: be against]; but the prosodic strengths are different, it is a little stronger in CLEC than in FROWN. For the word “influence”, it is not the case. The prosodic form and prosodic polarity in the two corpora are in contrast. In FROWN, the native speakers usually indicate the posture of [positive: be for], while in CLEC, the learners tend to show the posture of [negative: be against]. Till now, investigations on semantic prosody of synonyms in terms of the above three parameters are rarely seen. The present study is an attempt which would shed light on a new approach of investigating semantic prosody and provide a new perspective of learning synonyms for Chinese learners of English.