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Mandarin Speakers' English L2 Prosody and Degree of Foreign Accent: Effect of Length of Residence
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wang, Xinchun |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | This study examines how Mandarin speakers’ L2 English speech prosody contributes to perceived degree of foreign accent. A secondary goal is to explore whether Mandarin speakers’ English speech prosody is influenced by their extended length of residence in the U.S. The participants were two groups of highly advanced ESL speakers who used English on a daily basis in teaching. The two Mandarin groups were comparable in terms of learner characteristics such as age of learning, years of learning, and other L2 experience but differed significantly in Length of Residence (LOR) in the U.S. (0 vs. 12 years). The speakers’ productions of English sentences and excerpts of spontaneous speech rated for degree of foreign accent by native English listeners were submitted for acoustic measurement of prosodic features. The instrumental analysis focused on speech rate, pause features and these temporal properties (independent variables) are compared with the results of foreign accent rating (dependent variable) to explore which prosodic features predict the degree of foreign accent. Results show that the two native Mandarin groups’ speech rate did not differ from each other but was significantly slower than that of a native English control group in both spontaneous speech and read sentences. For spontaneous speech, pause features including number of pauses, mean pause duration, mean |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://doe.concordia.ca/copal/documents/47_Wang_Vol5.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
