This study compares the prosodic characteristics of L2-Mandarin as spoken by L1-English speakers using L1-Mandarin utterances. The acoustic correlates examined include individual tonal realizations, interactions of tones in sequence, durational features and intensity envelopes. L2-Mandarin users realize the contour tones RISE and FALL with both rising and falling pitch, and produce the second tone of disyllabic words with more varied pitch. L2-users employ larger vowel durations, syllable durations and larger variation over vowel intervals in sequential pairs than L1-Mandarin users. Both user groups show similar intensity envelopes. Implications of this study include tailoring language training programs that counterbalance L1 influences.
Beckman, Mary. E. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. Dordrecht: Foris.
Broselow, Ellen, Richard R. Hurtig and Catherine O. Ringen. 1987. The perception of second language prosody. In G. Ioup and S. H. Weinberger (eds.) Inter-language phonology: The acquisition of second language sound system. Cambridge: Newbury House. 350–361.
Büring, Daniel . 2003. On D-trees, beans, and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy 26. 511–45.
Chao, Yuan Ren . 1930. A system of tone-letters. Le maitre phonetique 45. 24–27.
Chao, Yuen Ren . 1968. A grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Chao, Yuan Ren . 1980. Chinese tone and English stress. In L. R. Waugh and C. H. V. Schooneveld (eds.) The melody of language. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press. 41–44.
Chen, Hsueh-Chu and Raung-Fu Chung. 2008. Interlanguage analysis of phonetic timing patterns by Taiwanese learners. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 34. 81–100.
Chen, Mathew Y. 2000. Tone sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, Yang, Michael Robb, Harvey Gilbert and Jay Lerman. 2001. A study of sentence stress production in Mandarin speakers of American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 109. 1681–1690.
Chen, Yiya and Yi Xu. 2006. Production of weak elements in speech: Evidence from f0 patterns of neutral tone in standard Chinese. Phonetica 63. 47–75.
Cooper, William, Steven Lapointe and Jeanne Paccia. 1977. Syntactic blocking of phonological rules in speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 61. 1314–1320.
Dauer, Rebecca M. 1983. Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics 11. 51–62.
Duanmu, San . 2000. The phonology of Standard Chinese. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Duanmu, San . 2004. Tone and non-tone languages: An alternative to language typology and parameters. Language and Linguistics 5. 891–923.
Feng, Shengli . 1998. Prosodic structure and compound words in classical Chinese. In J. L. Packard (ed.) New approaches to Chinese word formation: Morphology, phonology and the lexicon in modern and ancient Chinese. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 197–260.
Flege, James Emil . 1987. The instrumental study of L2 speech production: Some methodological considerations. Language Learning 37. 285–296.
Flege, James Emil and Serena Liu. 2001. The effect of experience on adults’ acquisition of a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23. 527–552.
Fox, Robert Aallen and Ying-Yong Qi. 1990. Context effects in the perception of lexical tones. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 18. 261–284.
Fry, Dennis B. 1958. Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech 1. 126–152.
Gandour, Jack . 1977. Counterfeit tones in the speech of southern Thai bidilectals. Lingua 41. 125–143.
Gandour, Jack . 1983. Tone perception in Far Eastern languages. Journal of Phonetics 11. 149–176.
Grabe, Esther and Ee Ling Low. 2002. Durational variability in speech and rhythm class hypothesis. In C. Gussenhoven and N. Warner (eds.) Laboratory phonology 7. Berli & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 515–546.
Greenberg, Steven . 1999. Speaking in shorthand — A syllable-centric perspective for understanding pronunciation variation. Speech Communication 29. 159–176.
Hallé, Pierre A., Yueh-Chin Chang and Catherine T. Best. 2004. Identification and discrimination of Mandarin Chinese tones by Mandarin Chinese vs. French listeners. Journal of Phonetics 32. 395–421.
Hombert, Jean-Marie . 1975. The perception of contour tones. In Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. 221–232.
Howie, John M. 1976. Acoustical studies of Mandarin vowels and tones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyde, Janet S. and Marcia. C. Linn. 1988. Gender differences in verbal ability: A metaanalysis. Psychological Bulletin 104. 53–69.
Klatt, Dennis H. 1976. Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 59. 1208–1221.
Kochanski, Greg, Esther Grabe, John Coleman and Bernard Rosner. 2005. Loudness predicts prominence: Fundamental frequency lends little. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118. 1038–1054.
Kochanski, Greg, Chilin Shih and Hongyan Jing. 2003. Hierarchical structure and wordstrength prediction of Mandarin prosody. International Journal of Speech Technology 6. 33–43.
Kratochvil, Paul. 1984. Phonetic tone sandhi in Beijing dialect stage speech. Cahiers de Linguistique. Asie Orientale 13. 135–174.
Ladd, D. Robert . 1996. Intonational phonology (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 79). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, Charles N. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1976. The acquisition of tone in Mandarinspeaking children. Child Language 4. 185–199.
Li, Wei Min . 1981. Shilun qingsheng he zhongyin [On the neutral tone and stress]. Zhongguo Yuwen [Chinese Linguistics] 1. 35–40.
Lin, Hua and Qian Wang. 2007. Mandarin rhythm: An acoustic study. Journal of Chinese Language and Computing 17. 127–140.
Lin, Mao-Ts’an . 1985. The pitch indicator and the pitch characteristics of tones in Standard Chinese. Acta Acoustica 3. 8–15.
Liu, Siyun and Arthur G. Samuel. 2004. Perception of Mandarin lexical tones when F0 information is neutralized. Language and Speech 47. 109–138.
Low, Ee Ling, Esther Grabeand Francis Nolan. 2000. Quantitative characterizations of speech rhythm: Syllable-timing in Singapore English. Language and Speech 43. 377–401.
MacKay, Ian R. A., James Emil Flege, Torsten Piske and Carlo Schirru. 2001. Category restructuring during second-language speech acquisition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110. 516–528.
Mi, Qing. 1986. A preliminary study on the teaching of neutral tone. Yuyan Jiaoxue yu Yanjiu [Language Teaching and Research] 2. 58–65.
Nakatani, Lloyd H., Kathleen D. O’Connor and Carletta H. Aston. 1981. Prosodic aspects of American English speech rhythm. Phonetica 38. 84–106.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. Doctoral dissertation. MIT.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. and Julia Hirschberg. 1990. The meaning of intonation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M. E. Pollack (eds.) Plans and intentions in communication and discourse (SDF Benchmark Series in Computational Linguistics). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 271–311.
Repp, Bruno H. and Hwei-Bing Lin. 1990. Integration of segmental and tonal information in speech perception: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Phonetics 18. 481–495.
Ross, Elliott D., Jerold A. Edmondson, G. Burton Seibert and Richard W. Homan. 1988. Acoustic analysis of affective prosody during right-sided Wada test: A within-subjects verification of the right hemisphere’s role in language. Brain and Language 33. 128–145.
Shen, Xiaonan S. 1989. Interplay of the four citation tones and intonation in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 17. 61–74.
Shen, Xiaonan S. 1990. Tonal coarticulation in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics 18. 281–295.
Shih, Chilin. 1986. The prosodic domain of tone sandhi in Chinese. Doctoral dissertation. University of California, San Diego.
Silipo, Rosaria and Steven Greenberg. 2000. Prosodic stress revisited: Reassessing the role of fundamental frequency. In Proceedings of the NIST Speech Transcription Workshop. College Park, MD. 16–19.
Sluijter, Agaath M. C. and Vincent J. van Heuven. 1996. Spectral balance as an acoustic correlate of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100. 2471–2485.
Sluijter, Agaath M. C., Vincent J. van Heuven and Jos J. A. Pacilly. 1997. Spectral balance as a cue in the perception of linguistic stress. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101. 312–322.
Turk, Alice and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2000. Word-boundary-related durational patterns in English. Journal of Phonetics 28. 397–440.
Wan, I-Ping. 2007. On the phonological organization of Mandarin tones. Lingua 117. 1715–1738.
Whalen, Douglas H. and Yi Xu. 1992. Information for Mandarin tones in the amplitude contour and in brief segments. Phonetica 49. 25–47.
White, Caryn. 1981. Tonal perception errors and interference from English intonation. Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association 16. 27–56.
Wu, Zong Ji . 1984. Putonghua sanzizu biandiao guilu [Rules of tone sandhi in trisyllabic words in Standard Chinese]. Zhongguo Yuyan Xuebao [Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics] 2. 70–92.
Xu, Yi. 1997. Contextual tonal variations in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics 25. 61–83.
Xu, Yi. 1998. Consistency of tone-syllable alignment across different syllable structures and speaking rates. Phonetica 55. 179–203.
Xu, Yi. 1999. Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of F0 contours. Journal of Phonetics 27. 55–105.
Xu, Yi and Maolin Wang. 2009. Organizing syllables into groups: Evidence from F0 and duration patterns in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics 37. 502–520.
Xu, Yi and Q. Emily Wang. 2001. Pitch targets and their realization: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese. Speech Communication 33. 319–337.
Xu, Yi and Ching Xu. 2005. Phonetic realization of focus in English declarative intonation. Journal of Phonetics 33. 159–197.
Zhang, Jie. 2002. The effects of duration and sonority on contour tone distribution: A typological survey and formal analysis. New York: Routledge.