English intonation of advanced learners

Abstract

Adopting a corpus-based approach within the autosegmental-framework, this paper reports on a study on L2 learners’ intonational deviances of edge tones within intonational units in spontaneous speech in monologues and dialogues derived from a “Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis” (CIA) (cf. Granger 1996, 2015). The analysis reveals that German, Spanish, and British speakers of English deviate from each other in their intonational phrasing and pitch heights in utterance-final and -medial position. The learners break their utterances into considerably more intonation phrases (IP) and intermediate phrases (ip) than native-speakers. While the British native-speakers (n = 10) mainly stick to the usage of falls within IPs and ips, the German learners (n = 10) frequently use rising tones and the Spanish learners (n = 10) frequently use falling tones.