Cross-language comparison of F0 range in speakers of native Chinese, native Japanese and Chinese L2 of Japanese: Preliminary results of a corpus-based analysis

Second language acquisition of Spanish prosody by Chinese speakers: Nuclear contours and pitch characteristics

“…In addition, it was found that Chinese learners of L2 English and L2 German had higher values than native speakers in F0 span on the phoneme level, and in pitch change amount on the utterance level, due to the negative influence of L1 mandarin prosody (Ding, Hoffmann, & Hirst, 2016;Ding, Jokisch, & Hoffmann, 2012). This general trend of compressed range and less F0 variability in L2 speech can be observed in many L1-L2 combinations, for example, in Spanish learners of L2 English (Backman, 1979), in Chinese learners of L2 Japanese (Shi et al, 2014), among many others. The consistency seen in L2 pitch implementation patterns is probably influenced by the L1 prosody, but more frequently it has been correlated with learners' lack of confidence or cautiousness when speaking a non-native language (Mennen, 1998;Shi et al, 2014;Volín, Poesová & Weingartová, 2015).…”

“…This general trend of compressed range and less F0 variability in L2 speech can be observed in many L1-L2 combinations, for example, in Spanish learners of L2 English (Backman, 1979), in Chinese learners of L2 Japanese (Shi et al, 2014), among many others. The consistency seen in L2 pitch implementation patterns is probably influenced by the L1 prosody, but more frequently it has been correlated with learners' lack of confidence or cautiousness when speaking a non-native language (Mennen, 1998;Shi et al, 2014;Volín, Poesová & Weingartová, 2015). Another plausible reason for those L2 speech deviations could be that learners are too focused on the segmental pronunciation and stress emphasis, thus, there might be a lack of attention given to extending and varying the F0 pitch in a native-like way (Zimmerer et al, 2014).…”

“…This difference in pitch implementation might be correlated with the tonal structure of Cantonese, although language proficiency and sociocultural conventions may also play a role in the VIAL n_19 -2022 divergence of voice pitch characteristics. Furthermore, a recent study on cross-language comparison suggested a wider F0 range and higher F0 register in native Chinese speech than in native Japanese speech (Shi, Zhang, & Xie, 2014). However, when Japanese was compared to American English, Spanish and Dutch, it was found to have the highest values of mean F0 in read speech (Hanley, Snidecor, & Ringel, 1966;Van Bezooijen, 1995).…”

“…PDQ values were calculated by dividing the standard deviation by the mean frequency of each utterance. This metric gives an account of pitch variability and generally, the higher the PDQ, the greater the F0 variance and the emotional turmoil in subjects' speech (Shi, Zhang, & Xie, 2014;Wang & Qian, 2018;Zimmerer et al, 2014). To sum up, the following six dependent variables were extracted for the comparison of L1-L2 pitch implementation characteristics:…”

Pitch Range, Dynamism and Level in Postcolonial Varieties of English: A Comparison of Educated Indian English and British English

“…Such attitudinal evaluations may be acutely felt by language learners, who, as a range of studies has shown, tend to have a compressed pitch range compared to native speakers [3,[10][11][12]. This result has also been confirmed for speakers learning English as a foreign language, such as L1 Swedish or L1 Italian learners of English, who use English mainly for international communication [13,14].…”