Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Second Language Pronunciation
Vol. 7:1 (2021) ► pp.38–61

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Prosody transfer failure despite cross-language similarities

Evidence in favor of a complex dynamic system approach in pronunciation teaching

ORCiD logo with link | Temple University
Published online: 6 August 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.18047.liu
Abstract
This study investigates how English and Mandarin speakers (1) use pitch resets and pauses to signal discourse boundaries, and (2) use pitch, duration, and intensity to indicate contrastive stress in their L1s. This study also explores how Mandarin-speaking English learners use prosodic features in L1 Mandarin and L2 English. Linear mixed-effects models showed that Mandarin and English share similarities in the forms and functions of prosody. However, Mandarin-speaking English learners did not transfer prosody usage to L2 English despite these similarities. These findings suggest that L2 prosody learning is not a typological transfer between two static language systems. Rather, it involves the interaction between two complex and dynamic prosody systems, each with its own mapping between prosodic forms and functions. Prosody teaching, therefore, should take into account the dynamic nature of prosody and compare L1 and L2 prosody in forms, meanings, and functions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Pitch resets and pauses
    • 1.2Contrastive stress
    • 1.3Prosody transfer
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Research materials
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Pitch resets and pauses at discourse boundaries
    • 3.2Contrastive stress
      • 3.2.1Mean pitch level
      • 3.2.2Pitch range
      • 3.2.3Duration
      • 3.2.4Intensity
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion & implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (69)
References
Anderson-Hsieh, J., Johnson, R., & Koehler, K. (1992). The relationship between native speaker judgments of nonnative pronunciation and deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Language Learning 421, 529–555. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol.81) (pp. 47–89). New York: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2018). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.37, retrieved 14 March 2018 from [URL]
Bolinger, D. L. (1961). Contrastive accent and contrastive stress. Language, 37(1), 83–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buss, L., Cardoso, W., & Kennedy, S. (2015). Longitudinal changes in the use of paratones in L2 English speech by Mandarin speakers. Organon, 30(58). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, G. (1977). Listening to spoken English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. M. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book and reference guide, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conway, A. (1996). Individual differences in working memory capacity: More evidence for a general capacity theory. Memory, 4(6), 577–590. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, Y., & Gussenhoven, C. (2008). Emphasis and tonal implementation in Standard Chinese. Journal of Phonetics, 36(4), 724–746. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, S.-W., Wang, B., & Xu, Y. (2009). Closely related languages, different ways of realizing focus. In Proceedings of the Interspeech 2009 (pp. 1007–1010). Brighton, UK.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chun, D. M. (1982). A contrastive study of the suprasegmental pitch in Modern German, American English, and Mandarin Chinese. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clennell, C. (1997). Raising the pedagogic status of discourse intonation teaching. ELT Journal, 51(2), 117–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruz-Ferreira, M. (1987). Non-native interpretive strategies for intonational meaning: An experimental study. Sound Patterns in Second Language Acquisition, 361, 103–120.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cucchiarini, C., & Strik, H. (2018). Automatic speech recognition for second language pronunciation assessment and training. In O. Kang, R. I. Thomson, & M. J. Murphy (Eds.), pp.556–569. The Routledge handbook of English pronunciation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cucchiarini, C., Neri, A., & Strik, H. (2009). Oral proficiency training in Dutch L2: The contribution of ASR-based corrective feedback. Speech Communication, 51(10), 853–863. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cucchiarini, C., Driesen, J., Van Hamme, H., & Sanders, E. (2008). Recording speech of children, non-natives and elderly people for HLT applications: The JASMIN-CGN corpus. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008 (pp. 1445–1450).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Derwing, T. M., Munro, M. J., & Wiebe, G. (1998). Evidence in favor of a broad framework for pronunciation instruction. Language Learning, 481, 393–410. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Derwing, T. M., & Rossiter, M. J. (2003). The effects of pronunciation instruction on the accuracy, fluency, and complexity of L2 accented speech. Applied Language Learning, 13(1), 1–17.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ding, S., Liberatore, C., Sonsaat, S., Lučić, I., Silpachai, A., Zhao, G.,… & Gutierrez-Osuna, R. (2019). Golden speaker builder–An interactive tool for pronunciation training. Speech Communication, 1151, 51–66. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, N. C., & Larsen-Freeman, D. (2009). Constructing a second language: Analyses and computational simulations of the emergence of linguistic constructions from usage. Language Learning, 591, 90–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fry, D. B. (1958). Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech, 1(2), 126–152. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gilbert, J. (2014). Myth 4: Intonation is hard to teach. In L. Grant (Ed.), Pronunciation myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching (pp. 107–136). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grant, L. (2014). Prologue to the myths: What teachers need to know. In L. Grant (Ed.), Pronunciation myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching (pp. 1–33). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hahn, L. D. (2004). Primary stress and intelligibility: Research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals. TESOL Quarterly, 38(2), 201–223. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hirschberg, J., & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986, July). The intonational structuring of discourse. In Proceedings of the 24th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 136–144). Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2016). Cross-language data on five types of prosodic focus. Proceedings of the Speech Prosody Conference 2016 (pp. 330–334). Boston, USA. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ito, K., Speer, S. R., & Beckman, M. E. (2004). Informational status and pitch accent distribution in spontaneous dialogues in English. In Speech prosody 2004, (pp. 279–282). Nara, Japan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kabagema-Bilan, E., López-Jiménez, B., & Truckenbrodt, H. (2011). Multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese. Lingua, 121(13), 1890–1905. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keating, P., & Kuo, G. (2012). Comparison of speaking fundamental frequency in English and Mandarin. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(2), 1050–1060. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ladd, D. R. (1984). Declination: A review and some hypotheses. Phonology Yearbook, 11, 53–74. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1988). Declination “reset” and the hierarchical organization of utterances. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 84 (2), 530–544. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Larsen-Freeman, D. (1997). Chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 18(2), 141–165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011). A complexity theory approach to second language development/acquisition. In D. Atkinson (Ed.), Alternative approaches to second language acquisition (pp. 48–72). London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Complexity theory: The lessons continue. In L. Ortega & Z. Han (Eds.), Complexity theory and language development: In celebration of Diane Larsen-Freeman (pp. 11–50). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehiste, I. (1979). Perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries. In B. Lindblom, & S. Ohman (Eds.), Frontiers of speech communication research (pp. 191–201). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1982). Some phonetic characteristics of discourse. Studia Linguistica, 36(2), 117–130. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lenth, R. V. (2016). Least-squares means: the R package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1), 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levis, J. M., & Muller Levis, G. (2018). Teaching high-value pronunciation features: Contrastive stress for intermediate learners. The CATESOL Journal, 30(1), 139.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levis, J., & Pickering, L. (2004). Teaching intonation in discourse using speech visualization technology. System, 32(4), 505–524. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levis, J., & Wichmann, A. (2015). English intonation-form and meaning. In M. Reed & J. Levis (Eds.), The handbook of English pronunciation (pp. 139–155). West Sussex. UK: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Li, A., & Post, B. (2014). L2 acquisition of prosodic properties of speech rhythm: Evidence from L1 Mandarin and German learners of English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(2), 223–255. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Menn, L., & Boyce, S. (1982). Fundamental frequency and discourse structure. Language and Speech, 25(4), 341–383. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oliveira, M. (2002, June). The role of pause occurrence and pause duration in the signaling of narrative structure. In International Conference for Natural Language Processing in Portugal (pp. 43–51). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oliveira Jr, M. (2003). Pitch reset as a cue for narrative segmentation. Evaluation, 3(4), 7–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ortega-Llebaria, M., & Colantoni, L. (2014). L2 English intonation: Relations between form-meaning associations, access to meaning, and L1 transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36(2), 331–353. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ouyang, I. C., & Kaiser, E. (2015). Prosody and information structure in a tone language: An investigation of Mandarin Chinese. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(1–2): 57–72. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paunović, T., & Savić, M. (2008). Discourse intonation – Making it work. In S. Komar & U. Mozetić (Eds.), As You Write It: Issues in Literature, Language, and Translation in the Context of Europe in the 21st Century, V (1–2), 57–75. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pennington, M. C., & Ellis, N. C. (2000). Cantonese speakers’ memory for English sentences with prosodic cues. The Modern Language Journal, 84(3), 372–389. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pickering, L. (2001). The role of tone choice in improving ITA communication in the classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 351, 233–255. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2004). The structure and function of intonational paragraphs in native and nonnative speaker instructional discourse. English for Specific Purposes, 23(1), 19–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Cohen, P. R., Morgan, J., & Pollack, M. E. (Eds.), Intentions in Communication (pp. 271–331). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL [URL]
Reed, M., & Michaud, C. (2005). Sound concepts: An integrated pronunciation course. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Intonation in research and practice: The importance of metacognition. In M. Reed & J. Levis (Eds.), The handbook of English pronunciation. (pp. 454–470). West Sussex: UK: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning1. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stockwell, R. P., Bowen, J. D., & Martin, J. W. (1965). The grammatical structures of English and Spanish (Vol. 41). University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swerts, M., & Geluykens, R. (1994). Prosody as a marker of information flow in spoken discourse. Language and Speech, 371, 21–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ward, N. G., Li, Y., Zhao, T., & Kawahara, T. (2016). Interactional and pragmatics-related prosodic patterns in Mandarin dialog. Proceedings of the Speech Prosody Conference 2016 (pp. 1230–1234). Boston, USA. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Waugh, L. R., & Bolinger, D. L. M. (1980). The melody of language. University Park Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wennerstrom, A. (1998). Intonation as cohesion in academic discourse: A study of Chinese speakers of English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20 (1), 1–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2001). The music of everyday speech: Prosody and discourse analysis. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xu, Y. (1999). Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours. Journal of Phonetics 271, 55–105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yip, M. (2002). Tone. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yufang, Y., & Bei, W. (2002). Acoustic correlates of hierarchical prosodic boundary in Mandarin. Proceedings of the ISCA International Conference on Speech Prosody 2002 (pp. 707–710). Aix-en-Provence, France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yule, G. (1980). Speakers’ topics and major paratones. Lingua, 521, 33–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zhang, J. (2014). Tones, Tonal Phonology, and Tone Sandhi. In C.-T. J. Huang, Y. H. A. Li, & A. Simpson (Eds.). The handbook of Chinese linguistics. (pp. 443–464). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Liu, Di, Alison McGregor, Beth Zielinski, Marnie Reed & Colleen Meyers
2025. ESL teachers’ metalanguage as evidence of their metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system. Language Awareness 34:2 ► pp. 324 ff. DOI logo
Levis, John M.
2024. Key issues in L2 pronunciation research. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 10:3 ► pp. 293 ff. DOI logo
Levis, John
2021. L2 pronunciation research and teaching. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 7:2 ► pp. 141 ff. DOI logo
Liu, Di & Marnie Reed
2021. Exploring the Complexity of the L2 Intonation System: An Acoustic and Eye-Tracking Study. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo
Munro, Murray J.
2021. On the Difficulty of Defining “Difficult” in Second-Language Vowel Acquisition. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue