Effect of native Mandarin dialects on English learners’ use of prosodic cues to stress

Abstract

Second-language learners (L2ers) weight phonetic cues to stress as a function of how these cues are used in the native language. This study investigates the effect of native dialects on the use of prosodic cues (F0 and duration) to English stress by native speakers (NSs) of Standard Mandarin (SM), Taiwanese Mandarin (TM), and English. Both TM and SM use F0 to realize lexical tones, but only SM uses duration to realize lexically contrastive stressed-unstressed vs stressed-stressed words. English NSs and intermediate-to-advanced TM-speaking or SM-speaking L2ers of English (at the same English proficiency) completed two sequence-recall tasks. In each trial, they heard four English non-words with trochaic and iambic stress, and pressed “1” and “2” to recall them in the correct order. In Experiment 1, participants heard natural stimuli (converging F0 and duration cues); in Experiment 2, the stress stimuli were resynthesized to contain only F0 cues, only duration cues, converging F0 and duration cues, or conflicting F0 and duration cues. In Experiment 1, all groups used naturally produced stress to recall English non-words. In Experiment 2, SM-speaking L2ers used duration more than TM-speaking L2ers to recall English non-words. Native dialect is suggested to be considered in L2 speech processing models.