Acquisition and Interpretation of Mandarin Speech Prosody by Native Speakers and Cantonese Learners

Abstract

This study aims to test the ability to match acoustic cues to different focus types and positions by advanced Cantonese L2 learners of Mandarin under the modalities of auditory-only and visual-auditory. Following the design by [29], participants were instructed to make a 5-Likert response to rate their preferences for the conversations they heard. Results show that visual-aids facilitated the perception of prosody; L2 learners showed fewer difficulties in differentiating narrow and contrastive focus than native Mandarin speakers. These findings provide significances for prosodic perception, second language acquisition and bilingual education.