Intonational Features Of L2 English:A Crosslinguistic Analysis Of F0 Range And Declination

Non-native intonation often poses a serious challenge to second language learners,but the acquisition of non-native intonation remains underrepresented in the literature.This study delves into the acquisition of non-native intonation through examining two acoustic parameters-f0 range and declination,both of which are argued to be less susceptible to the influence of transfer.An exploration into these two acoustic parameters may answer two essential questions-whether the aspects of second language intonation will manifest different patterns in learners' production,and whether learners will undergo different processes to acquire f0 range and declination patterns.This project on L2 intonation is expected to contribute to the general understanding of second language acquisition.A corpus-based approach has been adopted to investigate the fO properties in native English and L2 English produced by speakers from three language backgrounds-Mandarin,Finnish and German.The fO contours for each sentence in the EMIME Bilingual Database were extracted,linearly interpolated,smoothed and normalized automatically using a Python script,and acoustic analysis was carried out to investigate the potential variations in the phonetic settings of intonation.The f0 measures included f0 means,fO ranges,declination midline slopes,and contours for declination toplines and baselines.The f0 mean was defined as the fO value averaged across all raw fO points within a sentence,and the f0 range was computed as the difference between the f0 maximum and the f0 minimum.The midline slope was defined as the slope term of the regression line that was fitted to all empirical f0 points using the ordinary least square method.The toplines and baselines were computed as the contours of local f0 maximum and minimum that were automatically detected within windows moving along the fO contours.Linear mixed effects model confirmed that there were crosslinguistic differences in these two acoustic dimensions of intonation,namely,f0 range and f0 declination.It is found that that each language may have its own default pattern of declination,as the topline and baseline patterns are also found to be language specific.In all languages,the midline slopes were negatively correlated to sentence duration,evidencing that speakers may preplan the prosodic frames before uttering a sentence.Although some learners in this study have produced f0 range and declination in a way that is almost comparable to native English,other learners still produced English intonation with f0 parameters that are intermediate between native English and their mother tongues,notablely Finish learners' f0 level and Mandarin learners' f0 span,which may be caused by transfer.In terms of f0 declination slopes,Mandarin learners has exhibited an interlanguage delineation pattern in their L2 English,a pattern that deviates from the default declination in both English and Mandarin.While the leaners'deviations in habitual f0 level and range in reading task may be accounted for by linguistic transfer,the deviations in midline slopes might be caused by a weakened capacity to plan prosodic frames.In addition,learners approximated f0 declination pattern of English either through transferring their topline or baseline globally,or through transferring them in a position sensitive manner.It is demonstrated that L2 learners from different language backgrounds may deviate from native English along these acoustic dimensions.These findings may serve to deepen the general understanding of the acquisition of second language intonation.