Melody of Mandarin L2 English—when L1 transfer and L2 planning come together

Abstract

It is always more difficult for L2 speakers to produce the melody and tempo of continuous speech because it requires simultaneous planning of L2 linguistic specifications, higher level discourse associations and information placements. We assume that higher level planning requires within-phrase chunking and cross-phrase paragraph phrasing while information arrangements through emphasis weighting assignment and allocation. The above involved planning is most notably delivered through distinct global melodic modulations and patterns. The present compares the onset features of extracted Phrase Commands and their consistency with tagged discourse units and perceived emphases using speech data of L1 English, Taiwan (TW) L2 English and TW L1 Mandarin. Explicitly, we study F0 contour features to compare L1/L2 chunking units and their global patterns to pinpoint L2 features. Results of distinct TW L2 features compared with L1 English are (1) less consistent discourse chunking, (2) fewer distinct contours by prosodic words, (3) less degree of emphasis contrast in prosodic phrase and (4) more distinct contours in non-emphases. While (1) and (2) may reflect general L2 planning difficulties, our results show that (3) and (4) namely, flatter overall contour, are Mandarin inherent transferred to L2. We believe our proposed methods of extracted Phrase Command more accurately and better represent global melodic features that could be applied to other L1/L1 comparison in general; the findings could also be directly applied to CALL development of L2 prosody enhancement to improve overall intelligibility.