L2 perception and production of three English prosodic patterns
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation investigates second language (L2) English learners’ perception and production of certain prosodic patterns, with a focus on Chinese learners. A general goal of conducting the experiments laid out in this dissertation was to study in a systematic way how L2 learners perceive and produce certain types of pragmatically ambiguous utterances in English, compared with a set of native speakers. A second goal was to test the ability of L2 learners to improve their performance using a brief linguistically-informed targeted training, involving three components: auditory, visual, and explicit instruction.
The results unsurprisingly showed that L2 learners initially (before training) perform best on prosodic patterns they are likely familiar with. However, remarkably, even after only a ten-minute training, results demonstrated a strong positive influence of training for perception in all areas where there was room for improvement. Training had a moderate effect on production, in many cases aiding in expanding contrasts in duration, F0, and intensity towards native speaker patterns. Results also supported the proposal that the existence of certain lexical-level contrasts (e.g. pitch/tone contrast) in an L1 may make those acoustic properties more accessible to be manipulated in an L2.
The clear evidence from these studies that this type of brief targeted training leads to immediate improvement suggests that this type of training for prosody could be effectively extended to other prosodic patterns, and in other languages, as well. With further training similar to this, and incorporated into an L2 curriculum, it is expected that much more can even be accomplished.