Abstract
Phonological research has demonstrated that English intonation, variably referred to as prosody, is a multidimensional and multilayered system situated at the interface of information structure, morphosyntactic structure, phonological phenomena, and pragmatic functions. The structural and functional complexity of the intonational system, however, is largely under-addressed in L2 pronunciation teaching, leading to a lack of spontaneous use of intonation despite successful imitation in classrooms. Focusing on contrastive and implicational sentence stress, this study explored the complexity of the English intonation system by investigating how L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers use multiple acoustic features (i.e., pitch range, pitch level, duration, and intensity) in signaling contrastive and implicational information and how one acoustic feature (maximum pitch level) is affected by information structure (contrast), morphosyntactic structure (phrasal boundary), and a phonological phenomenon (declination) in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' speech. Using eye-tracking technology, we also investigated (1) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' real-time processing of lexical items that carry information structure (i.e., contrast) and typically receive stress in L1 speakers' speech; (2) the influence of visual enhancement (italics and bold) on L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive information; and (3) L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of pictures with contrastive information. Statistical analysis using linear mixed-effects models showed that L1 English speakers and Mandarin-English L2 speakers differed in their use of acoustic cues in signaling contrastive and implicational information. They also differed in the use of maximum pitch level in signaling sentence stress influenced by contrast, phrasal boundary, and declination. We did not find differences in L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers' processing of contrastive and implicational information at the sentence level, but the two groups of participants differ in their processing of contrastive information in passages and pictures. These results suggest that processing limitations may be the reason why L2 speakers did not use English intonation spontaneously. The findings of this study also suggest that Complexity Theory (CT), which emphasizes the complex and dynamic nature of intonation, is a theoretical framework that has the potential of bridging the gap between L2 phonology and L2 pronunciation teaching.
Highlights
In the past few decades, the field of L2 phonology has seen a number of highly influential theories, approaches and models including Autosegmental-Metrical phonology (AM) (Pierrehumbert, 1980), the Systemic Functional Approach (Halliday, 2015), and Discourse Intonation (Brazil, 1980) as well as the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), the Kiel intonation model (KIM) (Kohler, 1995), and the Fujisaki model (Mixdorff, 2000)
The results showed that in L1 English speakers’ speech, there were statistically significant differences between the contrastive and non-contrastive information regarding the use of pitch range, maximum pitch level, and duration
Analyzing L1 English and Mandarin-English L2 speakers’ speech production and processing of written and pictorial information from a Complexity Theory (CT) perspective, the present study found that sentence stress is a multidimensional and multifaceted feature dynamically connected with a series of linguistic and nonlinguistic variables
Summary
The past 30 years have witnessed evolutionary and farreaching advances in the field of L2 pronunciation, including establishment of the intelligibility principle (Munro and Derwing, 1995; Murphy, 2014), development of a holistic approach acknowledging the importance of both segmental and suprasegmental features (Anderson-Hsieh et al, 1992; Derwing et al, 1998; Levis and Levis, 2018), and development of technologies such as speech visualization (Levis and Pickering, 2004), automated speech recognition (ASR) (Cucchiarini and Strik, 2018) and speech synthesis (Ding et al, 2019). In the past few decades, the field of L2 phonology has seen a number of highly influential theories, approaches and models including Autosegmental-Metrical phonology (AM) (Pierrehumbert, 1980), the Systemic Functional Approach (Halliday, 2015), and Discourse Intonation (Brazil, 1980) as well as the PENTA model (Xu, 2004), the Kiel intonation model (KIM) (Kohler, 1995), and the Fujisaki model (Mixdorff, 2000) While these theories and models have gained wide popularity in research and software development, direct transfer of these theories and models into classroom teaching has faced tremendous difficulties. Complexity Theory (CT), which views the relationship among phonological features and phenomena as an interrelated and dynamic system, is a more appropriate theoretical framework for L2 pronunciation teaching
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