How Not to Acquire Tone: Cross-linguistic Influence in Prosody

Abstract

Tone is a persistent problem in the acquisition of Cantonese: even fluent non-native speakers have difficulty in producing and recognizing tones. Among many factors contributing to this difficulty is cross-linguistic influence at the prosodic level. This paper considers how such influence takes place in both bilingual children and adult second language learners. In children acquiring English and Cantonese simultaneously, Mok & Lee (2018) show that cross-linguistic influence arises in the development of prosody. Some bilingual children apply prosodic templates from English to Cantonese, treating Cantonese bisyllabic words as trochaic with a high-low pattern overriding the lexical tones, so that bi4bi1 ‘baby’ (low falling-high level) is pronounced as bi1bi4 (high level-low falling). The high-low pattern corresponding to stressed and unstressed syllables in English is characteristic of English-dominant children, and also attested in L2 learners of Cantonese. In a case study (Mak & Matthews 2011), a fluent L2 speaker with English as L1 frequently substituted the high level tone 1 for other target tones, so that lik6si2 ‘history’ was pronounced as lik1si2 following the English trochaic (strong-weak) template. There was also evidence of iambic (weak-strong) templates undergoing transfer. We interpret these non-target patterns as instances of cross-linguistic influence at the prosodic level. A stressed syllable in English overlaps phonetically with a high tone syllable in Cantonese. This is consistent with the role of structural overlap as a source of cross-linguistic influence, as argued by Hulk & Müller (2000) and Yip & Matthews (2007).