Advanced Foreign Language Learners: Prosodic Transition from L1 to L3

Abstract

This study provides more data from more typologically distant languages and focusing on interrogative sentences. Thus, this research addresses a key gap from previous studies that have only studied prosodic transitions between more typologically close languages. Moreover, this study successfully controls for the background of participants in a more detailed way by setting limitations on participants’ language proficiency and the recency of their language usage. These limitations are necessary since it is difficult to conduct research on prosodic transitions within 3 languages due to the limited number of trilingual participants. Finally, this paper finds that for people who speak second language (L2) and third language (L3) with high proficiency, the influence of phonological characters from L1 will be more prominent than that of L2 on L3 intonational status. This study can be improved, as the amount of data collected is limited. Besides this problem, intonational typology considered in this paper should be reevaluated in further studies.