The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Second Language Acquisition by Chuanren Ke

Author:Chuanren Ke
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781317367901
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Acquisition of Chinese intonation

Chinese is well known for its lexical tone system. However, intonation is also an integral part of Chinese phonology. L2 studies focusing on or partially attending to the topic of perception and production of L2 Chinese intonation are scarce (Q. Chen 2000; C.-S. Yang & Chan 2010; C.-S. Yang 2011, 2016; H. Zhang 2016d; among others). Tone and intonation share the common feature of being carried mainly by fundamental frequency (F0). It is easy to obtain F0 measurements as F0 is largely one-dimensional. However, tone and intonation’s respective contributions to surface F0 contours are extremely difficult to identify in natural languages, and even more so in the context of L2 acquisition. Various sentence level events (such as phrasing, question or statement intonations, sentence level focus marking, etc.) greatly complicate the acquisition of lexical tones. That is, L2 learners must learn to manipulate their F0 contour to deliver intonational meaning at the sentence level in order to fully acquire Chinese phonology, in addition to manipulating F0 to convey lexical tones. Due to the scant literature, this section only summarizes findings from C.-S. Yang and Chan (2010) and C.-S. Yang (2011).

C.-S. Yang and Chan (2010) examine the perception of Chinese intonation and intonation-superimposed tones by American learners at different proficiency levels, as compared to native Chinese listeners. In both the intonation and tone identification tasks, question intonation poses more difficulties than statement intonation. For question intonation, questions ending with tones having low offsets (such as T3 and T4) pose difficulty for L2 learners. Regarding perception of statements, those ending with T2 pose great difficulty for all learner groups. When identifying lexical tones at the end of statements and questions, less-advanced learners frequently misidentified T2 as dipping T3 and misidentified low falling Half-T3 as T4 in both statements and questions. These results indicate that while native speakers attend to both global and localized F0 cues when identifying sentence intonation, L2 learners depend primarily on localized terminal F0 cues.

C.-S. Yang (2011) compares prosodic phrasing, F0 patterns, and duration patterns in L1 and L2 Chinese. The author finds that, although prosodic phrasing in both L1 and L2 Chinese is closely related to syntactic structures, L2 learners tend to produce a larger break between the subject and the predicate. Pitch “resetting” seems to operate differently in L1 and L2 Chinese depending on tone types. With respect to F0 patterns of prosodic phrasing, C.-S. Yang finds that, the higher the proficiency level of the learner, the more they undershot targets in speech, with native speakers undershooting the most. This is important as it indicates that L2 learners have not fully acquired utterance-level prosody of Chinese and tend to produce each tone as fully as possible.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.