Prosody Transfer in Second Language Acquisition: Tonal Alignment in the Production of English Pitch Accent by Mandarin Native Speakers

Abstract

This study examines how the tonal alignment in L1 influences the production of L2 prosody, focusing on the realization of English L*+H pitch accent (i.e., listing contour) produced by Mandarin Chinese speakers. While Mandarin uses pitch mainly to signal lexical contrast, English uses it to convey discourse/pragmatic meaning (post-lexical). It has been observed in the literature that the F0 of lexical tone in Mandarin is syllable bound, while English pitch accent is contextually governed by various phonetic factors, including speech rate and syllable duration. Given these functional and prosodic differences, we ask whether prosodic transfer at the level of tonal alignment occurs across languages in which the grammatical function of pitch in L1 (Mandarin) differs fundamentally from that in L2 (English). Our results show that the L1 alignment pattern (syllable-bound) remains dominant in Mandarin native speakers' production of English listing contour; additionally, the speech rate effect on tonal timing is less consistent in the Mandarin production. Implications on second language learning and pedagogy are discussed.