In the acquisition of second language (L2) or foreign language (FL) pronunciation, learners not only learn how to pronounce consonants and vowels (tones as well, in the case of tone languages, such as Mandarin Chinese), they also learn how to produce the vowel reduction, vowel-consonant co-articulation, and prosody. Central to this dissertation is prosody, which refers to the way that an utterance is broken up into smaller units, and the acoustic patterns of each unit at different levels, in terms of fundamental frequency (F0), duration and amplitude. In L2 pronunciation, prosody is as important as
-- if not more important than -- consonants and vowels. This dissertation examines the acquisition of Mandarin prosody by American learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). Specifically, it examines four aspects of Mandarin prosody: (1) prosodic phrasing (i.e., breaking up of utterances into smaller units); (2) surface F0 and duration patterns of prosodic phrasing in a group of sentence productions elicited from L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese; (3) patterns of tones errors in L2 Mandarin productions; and (4) the relationship between tone errors and prosodic phrasing in L2 Mandarin.
The analysis of prosodic phrasing in the corpus shows that prosodic phrasing is closely related to syntactic structure in both L1 and L2 Mandarin productions. Moreover, results show that the syntactic structure in a prosodic phrase does not influence the prosodic structure of that constituent in either the learner group or the native group.
Analysis of the duration patterns in the L1 and L2 Mandarin corpus shows that the most consistent duration pattern that indexes prosodic phrasing is phrase-final lengthening. In addition, the duration analysis shows that the native group shows phrase-initial lengthening, the intermediate learner group produces phrase-initial shortening, and the advanced learner group displays no effect of phrasing on phrase-initial duration.
With respect to the F0 patterns of prosodic phrasing, it was found that the conflicting tone sequences (the sequences in which the target at the offset of a preceding tone and the target at the onset of the following tone are different) posed more difficulty for learners than the compatible tone sequences (the sequences in which the target at the offset of a preceding tone and the target at the onset of a following tone are identical). In addition, the productions by the native speakers involved more target undershoot (namely, the tone targets are not fully realized) than those by the L2 learners. It was also found that the tone target undershoot mostly occurred in the first prosodic phrase of an utterance. The transfer of English intonation patterns was also observed, such as the transfer of a high phrase accent at the end of a prosodic phrase.
Analysis of tone errors shows that the low and rising tones were the most frequent tone errors produced by the two groups of learners in their L2 Mandarin productions, regardless of the underlying tones. The patterns of tone errors in different tone sequences suggest that the learners not only had difficulty in changing the tone targets quickly in the conflicting tone sequences, they also had difficulty in changing the F0 direction quickly in the compatible tone sequences. It is argued that these tone errors were produced as a consequence of the superimposition of the L1 English utterance-level prosody over tone production by L2 learners.