Prosodic Realization of Focus in English by Bidialectal Mandarin Speakers

Abstract

This study was designed to explore the prosodic patterns of focus in English by bidialectal Mandarin speakers. One learner group speaks Nanjing Mandarin as first dialect (D1) and standard Mandarin as second dialect (D2), and the other learner group speaks Changchun Mandarin as D1 and standard Mandarin as D2. This paper compares their prosodic outcome of focus realization in English in a production experiment. Results indicate that both Changchun and Nanjing bidialectal speakers produced clear in-focus expansion of duration, pitch and intensity and post-focus compression (PFC) of pitch and intensity yet were not able to acquire native-like patterns of PFC in English. Although these two groups' D1s are different dialects of Mandarin, they produced statistically similar patterns of prosodic focus in L2 English. These findings provide further support for the claim that PFC cannot be easily transferred cross-linguistically [11], [14], [15], [17], [18] despite its existence in both dialects of learners' L1 and their L2.