Intonational interference on the perception and production of Mandarin Chinese tones by English‐speaking second language learners.

Abstract

Most previous studies on L1 transfer focus on segments. The present study investigated the effect of L1 intonation on English speakers’ acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones. Four intermediate learners read three sentence types: declaratives, yes/no questions, and a list sequence, both in English and Chinese. Their productions showed Tone 3 (low) to Tone 2 (rising), and Tone 4 (falling) to Tone 1 (high) errors, as expected if productions have a (English) terminal rise imposed on them. Nonfinal items in reading a list exhibited similar errors. In the perception task, subjects listened to Chinese productions of the different sentence types and identified the tone and whether the sentence is a statement or a question. When subjects identified a sentence as a question, they tended to judge the final tone to be Tone 2 (rising) or Tone 1 (high). Similarly, with final Tone 2, subjects usually called the sentence a question; and with final Tone 4, subjects often judged it as a declarative. English‐speaking learners associate the rising tone with questions and falling tone with declaratives, even though they know the final word can carry any tone in Chinese. This study quantitatively documents an effect of intonation on the learning of lexical tones.