The Perception-Production Link in Intonation: Evidence from German Learners of English

Abstract

Investigations of the link between the perception and production of prosody by language learners can inform theories of prosody perception and production, especially with regard to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for the implementation of prosody in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). The perception and production of prosody in L2 speech are often analyzed separately, but the link between the two is rarely the focus of investigation [e.g. 1, 2].In a previous study [3], we analyzed the perception of prosody in read speech by German learners of English (n=20), who performed similarly to the British English (BrE) control group (n=25) for some sentence types (e.g. statements, yes/noquestions) and worse for others (e.g. open and closed tag questions, sarcasm). The present study extends this analysis by comparing the same learners' perception and production of prosody in read speech with the same sentence types.Overall, the learners (n=20) performed better in production and were more similar to the native speakers' (n=10) performance than in the perception task. However, the learners significantly differed from the native controls in production, i.e. closed tag questions and checking questions. Interestingly, the learners also performed significantly better in yes/no and statement questions than the native speakers.

English intonation in storytelling

“…In summary, in comparing our two studies we have demonstrated that the Hong Kong learners attained the targets in production more than twice as much as in perception. This corroborates the finding for German learners of English in Puga et al (2018) and opposes the notion that perceptual capability necessarily precedes competence in production in L2 speech learning. While this may seem counter-intuitive, the fact that different mechanisms underlie perception and production may well explain what we have found.…”

“…Additionally, we might suppose that the picture would be more complex in L2 acquisition of prosody, since intonational categories such as fall, rise and level pitch are universal, but the function of the categories is language-specific, not to mention the interplay of the linguistic and paralinguistic functions of intonation. Puga et al (2018) demonstrated -using the same procedure to test listeners' understanding of the suitability of tones in various contexts -that German learners of English performed significantly better in production than in what we are referring to as perception, i.e. at odds with the traditional assumptions of a perceptionproduction link.…”

“…Table 4 summarises the scores for all participants across all sentence types for direct comparison with Puga et al (2018). For the HKE learners, of the 280 data points (28 sentences * 10 speakers) for each study, (1) is a count of all instances where the individual has given a correct/target response in the production study and the perception study, (2) where (s)he has done so in neither, (3) and ( 4) where (s)he has done so in only one of the studies: 4) is approximately double the score for (3).…”

A Contrastive Analysis of Persian and English Vowels and Consonants

“…There are many studies focusing on CA of intonation in different languages (Deterding 2018;Eghlidi 2016;Esteve-Gibert et al 2018;Forsberg & Abelin 2018;Hayati 2005;Hellmuth 2018;Peters 2018;Puga et al 2018;Tsui & Tong 2018). There are several studies of the Persian language (Eghlidi 2016;Hayati 1996Hayati , 1998Hayati , 2005Soltani 2007;Yarmohammadi 2002) that focus specifically on contrasting the intonation patterns of Persian and English.…”