2008/06/18

Wennerstrom, A. (1994). Intonational meaning in English discourse: A study of non-native speakers. Applied Linguistics, 15(4): 399-420.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Shelly

This paper reports a study on the intonation of non-native English speakers, who were from three language groups: Spanish, Japanese, and Thai. It was hypothesized that, compared to native speakers, some elements of intonation by these L2 speakers would be absent or diminished. In order to test this hypothesis, the author recorded subjects’ oral reading in English, free-speech in English and free-speech in their L1. Based on the framework proposed by Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990), analyses were done on their high phrase accent, high pitch accent, low pitch accent, paratone, and high boundary tone. Results showed that, unlike native English speakers who have larger F₀ contrasts in their accent pitch and non-accent pitch, non-native speakers have less contrastive patterns, especially for the Thai group. It was surmised that it might be because Thai is a tone language, which does not have pitch accent. Therefore they were the least similar to English among the three groups. As for the Spanish group, it was found that they shared some common intonation patterns with native English speakers. This might be due to the fact that Spanish speakers have more exposure to English in their country, compared with the other groups. The group which had the most similar contrastive patterns as English native speakers was the Japanese group. This might be because Japanese is a pitch-accent language, and therefore did a better job in contrasting accent and non-accent pitch. Concluding from the above findings, there are similar and different patterns in L2 speakers’ intonation, compared with native speakers, and such differences and similarities may be caused by the language differences and similarities between English and L2 speakers’ native tongues.