LINGUIST List 22.1038

Wed Mar 02 2011

Diss: Lang Acq: Yang: 'The Acquisition of Mandarin Prosody by ...'

Editor for this issue: Mfon Udoinyang <mfonlinguistlist.org>

        1.     Chunsheng Yang , The Acquisition of Mandarin Prosody by American Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL)
Message 1: The Acquisition of Mandarin Prosody by American Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL)
Date: 02-Mar-2011
From: Chunsheng Yang <ycsgeorgegmail.com>
Subject: The Acquisition of Mandarin Prosody by American Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL)
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Institution: Ohio State University Program: Department of East Asian Languages and Literature Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2011

Author: Chunsheng Yang

Dissertation Title: The Acquisition of Mandarin Prosody by American Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL)

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
Subject Language(s): Chinese, Mandarin (cmn)                             English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
Marjorie K. M. Chan Mineharu Nakayama Cynthia G. Clopper Mary Esther Beckman
Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation examines the acquisition of Mandarin prosody by Americanlearners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). Specifically, it examinesthe four aspects of Mandarin prosody: (1) the prosodic phrasing (i.e.,breaking up of utterances into smaller units); (2) the surface F0 andduration patterns of prosodic phrasing in a group of sentence productionselicited from L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese; (3) the patterns oftones errors in L2 Mandarin productions; and (4) the relationship betweentone errors and prosodic phrasing in L2 Mandarin. The analysis of prosodicphrasing in the corpus shows that prosodic phrasing is closely related tosyntactic structure in both L1 and L2 Mandarin productions. Moreover,results show that the syntactic structure in a prosodic phrase does notinfluence the prosodic structure of that constituent in either the learnergroup or the native group. Analysis of the duration patterns in the L1 andL2 Mandarin corpus shows that the most consistent duration pattern thatindexes prosodic phrasing is phrase-final lengthening. In addition, theduration analysis shows that the native group shows phrase-initiallengthening, the intermediate learner group shows phrase-initialshortening, and the advanced learner group shows no effect of phrasing onphrase-initial duration. This pattern of phrase-initiallengthening/shortening indicates a learning effect in that the advancedlearner group patterned more similarly to the native group. We alsoobserved the transfer of L1 English stress patterns, such as the weakversus strong alternating stress patterns in the L2 corpus. With respect tothe F0 patterns of prosodic phrasing, it was found that the conflictingtone sequences (the sequences in which the target at the offset of apreceding tone and the target at the onset of the following tone areidentical) posed more difficulty for learners than the compatible tonesequences (the sequences in which the target at the offset of a precedingtone and the target at the onset of a following tone are different).Specifically, the productions by the native speakers involved more targetundershoot (namely, the tone targets are not fully realized) than those bythe L2 learners. It was also found that the tone target undershoot mostlyoccurred in the first prosodic phrase of an utterance. The transfer ofEnglish intonation patterns was also observed, such as the transfer of ahigh phrase accent at the end of a prosodic phrase. Analysis of tone errorsshows that the low and rising tones were the most frequent tone errorsproduced by the two groups of learners in their L2 Mandarin productions,regardless of the underlying tones. The patterns of tone errors indifferent tone sequences suggest that the learners not only had difficultyin changing the tone targets quickly in the conflicting tone sequences,they also had difficulty in changing the F0 direction quickly in thecompatible tone sequences. It is argued that these tone errors wereproduced as a consequence of the superimposition of the L1 Englishutterance-level prosody over tone production by L2 learners.


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