Production of accentual prominence patterns in English by Mandarin Chinese speakers

McGory, Julia Tevis

doi:10.1121/1.416647

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similar effects may manifest themselves at other levels of prosodic structure as well, since languages use a whole range of prosodic characteristics for communicative purposes. Indeed, in line with what has been reported for L2 acquisition in general [Flege, 1995], various studies have shown that transfer or interference from L1 is also an important factor in the production of L2 intonation [Chun, 2002;Gut, 2003Gut, , 2005McGory, 1997;Mennen, 2004;Nguyên et al, 2008;Ploquin, 2009;Rasier and Hiligsmann, 2007;Ueyama and Jun, 1998, and articles in Trouvain and Gut, 2007].…”

Section: Linguistic Transfer From First Language To Second Languagementioning

confidence: 56%

“…The study showed that both groups of speakers did not produce English prominence relations as in the target language. This could be explained by the fact that each of the respective languages uses pitch modulations differently in their grammars, with English being a stress language with pitch accents on prominent words, Korean a non-stress language with phrase accents, and Mandarin a stress language with tones [McGory, 1997]. Ueyama and Jun [1998] investigated post-focus deaccentuation in the English spoken by speakers of Tokyo Japanese and Seoul Korean, and found that the degree of deaccentuation in Japanese and Korean English was determined by the length of the noun phrase, learners' experience and sentence type.…”

Section: Prosodic Marking Of Prominence and Utterance Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…McGory [1997] investigated the acquisition of American English prominence marking by Korean and Mandarin Chinese speakers. The study showed that both groups of speakers did not produce English prominence relations as in the target language.…”

Section: Prosodic Marking Of Prominence and Utterance Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Swerts¹,

Zerbian²

2010

Phonetica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies have shown that characteristics of a person’s first language (L1) may transfer to a second language (L2). The current study looks at the extent to which this holds for aspects of intonation as well. More specifically, we investigate to what extent traces of the L1 can be discerned in the way intonation is used in the L2 for two functions: (1) to highlight certain words by making them sound more prominent and (2) to signal continuation or finality in a list by manipulating the speech melody. To this end, the article presents an explorative study into the way focus and boundaries are marked prosodically in Zulu, and it also compares such prosodic functions in two variants of English in South Africa, i.e., English spoken as an L1, and English spoken as an L2/additional language by speakers who have Zulu as their L1. The latter language is commonly referred to as Black South African English. This comparison is interesting from a typological perspective, as Zulu is intonationally different from English, especially in the way prosody is exploited for signalling informationally important stretches of speech. Using a specific elicitation procedure, we found in a first study that speakers of South African English (as L1) mark focused words and position within a list by intonational means, just as in other L1 varieties of English, whereas Zulu only uses intonation for marking continuity or finality. A second study focused on speakers of Black South African English, and compared the prosody of proficient versus less proficient speakers. We found that the proficient speakers were perceptually equivalent to L1 speakers of English in their use of intonation for marking focus and boundaries. The less proficient speakers marked boundaries in a similar way as L1 speakers of English, but did not use prosody for signalling focus, analogous to what is typical of their native language. Acoustic observations match these perceptual results.

show abstract

Section: Linguistic Transfer From First Language To Second Languagementioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Prosodic Marking Of Prominence and Utterance Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Swerts¹,

Zerbian²

2010

Phonetica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More specifically related to the L2 acquisition of prosodic focus, McGory (1997) found that nonnative English speakers did not vary F 0 of stressed syllables according to intonational context as did native speakers, and produced higher F 0 in stressed than in unstressed syllables in both focused and unfocused words. The degree of this tendency varied by subjects' L1 (Korean vs. Mandarin) and L2 English experience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic Realization of Focus in Bilingual Production of Southern Min and Mandarin

Chen

Xu²,

Guion-Anderson³

2015

Phonetica

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previously post-focus compression (PFC) - the lowering of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of post-focal words to below those of the same words in identical sentences with neutral focus - was found in Beijing Mandarin but not in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin. This study investigated whether the presence of PFC would vary with age and language use of societal bilinguals of Southern Min and Mandarin. Three groups of bilingual speakers of Quanzhou Southern Min and Mandarin, age around 20, 40 and 60, were examined for their prosodic realization of focus. All the speakers acquired Southern Min first, followed by Mandarin in childhood, but the younger speakers used more Mandarin than the older speakers. Comparisons of duration, intensity and F0 in focused, prefocus and post-focus words indicated that all groups produced Taiwan-like focus, i.e., without PFC, in Southern Min, but the youngest group produced Beijing-like PFC in Mandarin. These findings reveal that increased language experience, such as greater amount of second language (L2) use, correlates with increased ability to produce native-like PFC in L2, suggesting that PFC can be used as an indicator in assessing L2 speech acquisition.

show abstract

“…Prosodic acquisition (i.e., the acquisition of stress, intonation, and so on) in many languages other than English (McGory 1997, Archibald 1995, 1998a, however, is a rather under-studied area (Gut 2003, Nguyen et al 2008. With respect to Mandarin Chinese, many studies were conducted on the acquisition of tones by L2 learners, due to the fact of Chinese being a tone language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring the pitch patterns of L2 Mandarin Chinese

Yang¹

2013

Chinese as a Second Language Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study examines the acquisition of utterance-level pitch patterns in Mandarin Chinese by American second language (L2) learners. It is an exploratory study with the goal of identifying the utterance-level prosody in L2 Mandarin Chinese. The focus of this study is not on the pitch patterns of individual learners but those of subject groups. The analysis shows that the pitch patterns between two syntactic structures for the same tone sequence vary with the tone sequence and the subject group. The biggest difference between first language (L1) and L2 Mandarin Chinese lies in the frequency of target undershoot in L2 speech. The infrequent tone target undershoot in L2 speech, especially among the intermediate learners, was attributed to the incomplete acquisition of L2 prosody. It was argued that the infrequent tone target undershoot may render L2 speech more staccato or robot-like, which contributes to the perception of a foreign accent in L2 Mandarin Chinese.

show abstract

Production of accentual prominence patterns in English by Mandarin Chinese speakers

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Prosodic Realization of Focus in Bilingual Production of Southern Min and Mandarin

Acquiring the pitch patterns of L2 Mandarin Chinese

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About