The Influence Of L2 Experience On The L1 At The Suprasegmental Level

In the realm of Second Language Acquisition, the emphasis has long been centered on the L1 influence on the L2; few attentions were paid onto the influence from the L2 to the L1, or the so-called reverse transfer. In fact, language transfer should be bi-directional, with Li and L2 mutually influencing each other. The present study seeks to reveal the relationship between the experience of Putonghua (L2) and Minnan dialect (L1) tone productions through an experimental investigation on the Minnan dialect-Putonghua bilinguals, in the hope of proving that reverse transfer would be realizable at the suprasegmental level between two tonal languages. 35 subjects participate in the experiment, with 5 Minnan dialect monolinguals as control group for extracting Norm; and the other 30 subjects are Minnan dialect-Putonghua bilinguals composed of three groups (university, high-school and primary school students respectively) with 10 people in each. All the subjects are required to undertake a picture-naming task, with their single word productions recorded for analysis. The results indicates that the L1 dialect tone productions of three bilingual groups all exhibit significant difference from the Norm, and the extent to which one's dialect tone productions are subject to influence depends on the level of one's Putonghua proficiency. It means the experience of L2 does exert influence on the L1 tone productions.