A pilot study on the perception of Chinese and English prosodic focus by Chinese learners of English: the effect of foreign accent

Prosodic focus plays an important role in daily speech communication, typically marking the key information in utterances, such as the new information. It was found that English speakers utilize focus to differentiate between new and old information in perception, while it was unclear if Chinese learners of English were able to do so when perceiving prosodic focus in Mandarin Chinese (L1) and English (L2). Moreover, earlier studies showed that, native speakers show adaptation to foreign-accented semantic or syntactic infelicity, while it was unclear whether they show similar adaption to infelicitous prosodic focus. Therefore, the current (pilot) study explored (1) whether Chinese L2 learners were able to utilize prosodic focus to differentiate between new and old information when perceiving Chinese and English utterances, and (2) whether they show adaptation to infelicitous prosodic focus when hearing foreign accent. Twelve English major students were recruited as participants. Audio materials included Chinese and English utterances with felicitous, neutral and infelicitous focus conditions, produced by native speakers (without foreign accents) and L2 learners (with foreign accent). Visual-world paradigm was adopted to record the reaction time and eye movement. The results showed that Chinese L2 learners were able to utilize prosodic focus to differentiate between new and old information when hearing both Chinese and English utterances, showing fast response in felicitous focus condition. However, when hearing foreign accent, they did not utilize prosodic focus to perceive new/old information, showing adaptation to infelicitous focus. These (preliminary) results indicate that L2 learners can accurately perceive prosodic focus in English. It also implies that there, when hearing utterance produced with foreign-accent, listeners show adaptation to not only semantic and syntactic infelicity, but also prosodic infelicity.