The interplay of tone and intonation: f0 contours produced by Hungarian learners of Mandarin

In this acoustic analysis we compare the f 0 contours of syntactically unmarked Mandarin Chinese (MC) echo-questions to statements in the production of two groups of Hungarian learners of Chinese and a native MC control group. MC and Hungarian differ in terms of question intonation patterns, thus we hypothesized that synchronizing tone and intonation production poses problems to L2 learners of MC due to the different intonation patterns and the absence of tones in the L1. In the experiment speakers were asked to contrast the same 4-syllable utterance in the two analysed moods: as a declarative and as a syntactically unmarked echo-question. We compared f 0 contours of each isolated syllable by general additive mixed models. Our results partially confirmed the hypothesis that L2 learners’ production MC questions are not as elevated in their characteristic as natives, yet L2 speakers do differentiate between the two moods in their production but produce terminal tonal patterns differently than those of natives.