Fundamental frequency in Mandarin Chinese and English: Implications for second-language speakers.

摘要

This dissertation presents the results of a production experiment designed to investigate differences between the English and Mandarin utterance-level prosodic contours produced by native and non-native speakers. Materials were controlled across languages for sentence length, sentence-level focus, and illocutionary type. A bi-directional design permitted a double comparison of L1 English with L2 English by Mandarin speakers, and of L1 Mandarin with L2 Mandarin by English speakers. The particular focus of the study was on global pitch setting and pitch contours at sentence boundaries. Of interest was whether L2 speakers would appropriately differentiate sentences of three illocutionary types: statements, questions, and surprise echo questions, which are typically prosodically disambiguated in both English and Mandarin, Native language data for both English and Mandarin confirmed some widely noted phenomena---the final F0 rise in English yes/no and echo questions, and a global raising of pitch throughout Mandarin yes/no and echo questions. L2 production data for both groups of L2 learners exhibit a striking absence of central aspects of the target language's utterance-level prosody. In addition, transfer of global L1 prosodic contours into the L2 was entirely absent; there was no sign of transfer of global prosodic strategies from Mandarin into English, or from English into Mandarin. Some transfer effects were observed, however, with regard to local phenomena within the final syllable. L1-Mandarin speakers compressed illocution-related pitch excursions in English into the final syllable only, in the fashion of pitch excursions that realize Mandarin lexical tones. L1-English speakers imported a final-syllable rise on the final syllable in Mandarin questions. Both participant groups exhibited a considerably narrower F0 range overall in their L2 than in their L1. A range of possible explanations is offered for why transfer was not more extensive and why in particular it was confined to utterance-final position. A tentative conclusion is that local and global prosodic phenomena may differ fundamentally in their linguistic, processing, and neural bases.