Tonal features in the English spoken by L1 Mandarin speakers

Abstract

 English stress correlates with pitch, intensity, duration and vowel quality, while Mandarin tone mainly depends on pitch. The prosodic acquisition of L2 is always influenced by the L1 of learners, so this dissertation examined whether there are tonal features in the English spoken by L1 Mandarin speakers. In this study, the participants were asked to do a word reading task, a sentence reading task and a story-telling task in English. The pitch heights, intensities, durations of vowels and the pitch contours were measured. The results showed that the participants used intensity and duration similarly as native English speakers to pronounce stress. Besides, the pitch heights of stressed syllables are significantly higher than unstressed syllables as in English, but based on the previous work, the L1 Mandarin speakers actually pronounce stress with differences, they use higher pitch level and later F0 peak. The pitch contours of English words meet the pitch contours of Chinese tones, and some participants pronounced the utterance-internal words with the same contours as in declarative one-word utterances, which means some of them pronounced the stress with fixed pitch contour as if it is a lexical tone. In a word, the observation suggests that there are some tonal features in the English of some participants, although they also use stress in their English utterances.