Mandarin Chinese sentence intonation patterns in the production of Hungarian learners of Chinese

In this acoustic analysis, we aim to examine how Hungarian learners of Mandarin Chinese (MC) contrast and distinguish the intonation patterns of unmarked and 吗 ma -particle marked yes-no questions vs. statements. Since Chinese is a tonal language, the issue of intonation is more complicated than in non-tonal languages, such as Hungarian. L1 patterns for question intonation differ from the L2, and we expect learners not to produce MC questions with the elevated characteristic of f0 (compared to statements), due to L1 transfer. Moreover, we expect Hungarians to produce less variability in f0 range than natives. To test these assumptions, first we extracted a grid of f0 realization, i.e., the highest peaks and lowest troughs of each syllable, attaining the spine of the f0 structure. Then we analyzed f0 range, as the difference between maximal and minimal f0. Our results showed that Hungarians produce MC questions without the elevated f0 characteristic of natives’ production, and the expected f0 range differences were partially confirmed.