Acquisition of intonation in a second language

Participants:

Aoju Chen (co-ordinator) (Max-Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen)
Vicky Tzuyin Lai (University of Colorado at Boulder, US)
Ineke Mennen (Bangor University, UK)

Project description

This project group studies the intonation of L2 learners from both the perspective of comprehension and the perspective of production. As regards comprehension, we address questions centering on the issue of how L2 learners at different proficiency levels process intonational information in language comprehension. As regards production, we are concerned with the structural properties of L2 learners' intonation and the use of intonation in everyday communication in L2. The overarching question in our research is how general production mechanisms, learners' L1 and L2 can help to understand the characteristics of learner intonation.
Current subprojects are as follows:

The use of intonation in online processing of information status in a second language

Aoju Chen and Vicky Lai (University of Colorado, Boulder)

English native listeners can rapidly map intonation to information status in reference resolution (Dahan et al. 2002, Chen et al. 2007). Specifically, L*H (i.e. a rising pitch pattern) and deaccentuation are associated with givenness, and H*L (a falling pitch pattern) and L*HL (a rising-falling pitch pattern) with newness. Dutch and English are similar in marking new referents most frequently with H*L and given referents with deaccentuation but different in that Dutch also uses L*H in new referents (Braun and Chen 2007). Assuming L1 transfer, we would expect Dutch learners of English to associate H*L and L*H with newness and deaccentuation with givenness in English. Adopting an eyetracking paradigm (Dahan et al. 2002), we  investigates the processing of information status signaled by intonation in Dutch learners of English at low- vs. high- proficiency levels (senior high school pupils vs. 3rd-year English majors). For a summary of the initial results, click here.

The ups and downs of learner intonation

Participants: Ineke Mennen (Principal Investigator), Aoju Chen

In this project, we adopt the 'learner variety approach' (Klein and Perdue 1997), and investigate L2 learner intonation varieties as systems in their own right. We will focus on both the structural properties of learner varieties at a given longitudinal point and how they develop over time. The learner varieties currently under investigation are L2 English spoken by Punjabi and Italian learners and L2 German spoken by Italian learners as represented in the European Sciences Foundation (ESF) Second Language Database. The internal organisation of each learner variety will be analysed in four aspects of intonation that make up an intonational variety and along which varieties can differ (Ladd 1996):
a) the inventory of intonation patterns (i.e. types of pitch accents and boundary tones);
b) the way these patterns are realised (e.g. the timing and scaling of pitch peaks);
c) how they are distributed (i.e. which pattern is more frequent);
d) how they are used to signal certain  functions (i.e. interrogativity).
Our current work is concerned with how Italian learners of English use intonation to express interrogativity in English at three longitudinal points (early, mid, and late). To read our paper on this study, click here.
Note: This project is funded by a grant from the Economic and Social research Council in the UK (http://www.qmu.ac.uk/ssrc/staff/Imennen/upsanddowns.htm) in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Intonation in reference tracking in second language learners

Aoju Chen

Previous work has shown that second language learners at an early stage of proficiency have difficulty with reference tracking (e.g. Gullberg 2003) . They tend to use a lexical noun phrase (NP) to refer to the immediately maintained referent instead of a pronoun or a zero anaphora, and consequently their speech can be ambiguous. The use of a NP to refer to a previously mentioned referent occurs also in the speech of native speakers. But native speakers, at least in a West Germanic language, use intonation to signal the change in the information status of a referent. In this project, I am investigating how untutored learners use intonation to disambiguate the ambiguity in the information status of a referent in narratives at different longitudinal points and whether the presence or absence of intonational marking interacts with changes in sentence position and grammatical role (e.g. agent vs. patient).

References:

Braun, B. and Chen, A. (2007). And now for something completely different: intonation of ‘now’ and scope ambiguity in English and Dutch. Poster presented at the 13th AMLaP. Turku. Finland.

Chen, A., den Os, E., and de Ruiter, J. P. (2007). Pitch accent type matters for online processing of information status: Evidence from natural and synthetic speech. The Linguistic Review, 24 (2-3), 317-344.

Dahan, D., Tanenhaus, M., and Chambers, C.G. (2002). Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language 47, 292-314.

Gullberg, M. (2006). Handling Discourse: Gestures, reference tracking, and communication strategies in early L2. Language Learning, 56(1), 155-196.

Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997). The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13 (4), pp. 301 – 347.

Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.