A Contrastive Study Of Mandarin Information Processing Between Native Speakers And Advanced American Learners

This study investigates the differences between native Mandarin speakers and advanced American learners in online processing information structure in Mandarin conversational discourse.It aims at whether advanced American learners of Mandarin have the same patterns of eye movement and speech prosody as those of native speakers of Mandarin.Two types of data were recorded and analyzed,the eye-tracking data,including fixation counts,fixation duration,regression-in counts and regression-out counts of the four interest areas,were extracted by the Data Viewer software of Eye-link 1000 Plus.The prosodic data,including mean duration,mean intensity,mean pitch(F0)and F0 range of the syllables of the target words,were recorded by a SHURE professional head-worn dynamic microphone linked to a Marantz Professional PMD661 MK solid state recorder for acoustic analysis.For native Mandarin speakers,their fixation counts,fixation duration,regression-in counts,regression-out counts,syllable duration and F0 range decrease while syllable intensity increases as the information gets old to the speaker in the discourse.Syllable pitch shows no change across information status.However,within-trial repetition and old information resulted in the reduction of duration,intensity and F0 and the increase of pitch range.For advanced American learners,fixation counts,fixation duration,regression-in counts,regression-out counts,syllable duration and syllable intensity of the target words decrease while syllable pitch and F0 range show no significant change across information status.Moreover,within-trial repetition and old information resulted in the increase of duration,F0 and intensity but still no notable variation of pitch range.I also find that learners show similar variation patterns in all eye-tracking parameters,namely,fixation counts,fixation duration,regression-in counts and regression-out counts,suggesting some paralinguistic behavior is relatively easy for advanced American learners to acquire.However,prosodic variations in L2 Mandarin are more difficult to learn.Specifically,only syllable duration and pitch are relatively less challenging to learn.In other words,advanced learners are able to speak faster but remain a relatively stable fundamental frequency when processing old information as native Mandarin speakers do.However,for syllable intensity and pitch range,the variations between new and old information are neither significant nor native-like.In addition,although advanced American learners share the same variation patterns with native Mandarin speakers in the parameters mentioned above,there are still significant differences in the specific values between the two groups,which can give some inspiration to the teaching and learning of second language(L2),especially prosody acquisition of L2 in the future.