The production and recognition of prosody by native and non-native English speakers

Abstract

Although it is known that poorer acquisition of second language (L2) prosody can lead to a stronger perceived foreign accent, weaker comprehensibility, and lower intelligibility, few studies have explored L2 prosody. This dissertation partially fills this gap by evaluating the acquisition of English prosody by Cantonese- and Korean-English bilinguals. These two language backgrounds were chosen to examine transfer or interference effects that may be specific to tone languages (e.g., Cantonese), which generally differ prosodically from non-tone languages (e.g., English and Korean). Both early and late bilinguals were recruited to assess for potential age of learning (AOL) effects, and a balanced experimental design was employed to evaluate both talker and listener factors, and any in-group advantage or intelligibility benefit that may stem from matching talker and listener backgrounds. Four types of prosody were studied: Emotional, attitudinal, emphatic, and sentence-type prosody. Results confirm that AOL effects are present in L2 acquisition of prosody, where early bilinguals are generally native-like in their communication while late bilinguals perform more poorly. In some instances, Cantonese-English early bilinguals were understood more clearly than monolingual talkers, even by monolingual listeners. Therefore, there is some evidence that early exposure to two languages may enhance prosodic expression in at least one of those languages. In addition, there was no evidence that the tonal structure of Cantonese contributed to overall poorer acquisition of English prosody than the non-tone structure of Korean, although the pattern of results did vary between the two groups. Accurate comprehension was driven by talker factors more than listener factors, suggesting that L2 prosody may develop faster, or more fully, in comprehension compared to expression. An in-group advantage was observed only for monolinguals when compared to Cantonese-English bilinguals in the communication of sarcastic prosody, suggesting that in-group advantages in L2 prosody may be limited to the situation where the form of prosody is more complex and where the ESL speaker is of a tone language background. In addition, an intelligibility benefit for late bilinguals was observed in the communication of both emotional and attitudinal prosody, confirming that the AOL effects observed are at least partially due to transfer from L1 to L2.