L2 intonation: A study of L1 transfer in Japanese intonation by English-speaking learners

Abstract

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody. The second language (L2) intonation is a complicated product of the L1 transfer at two levels of prosodic hierarchy, at word level and at phrase levels. For each level, the typical error patterns were listed and described in terms of L2 acquisition in the first part. In the second part, intonation contours were acoustically measured and compared with native speakers’ model. The result shows that it is not a necessary assessment criterion for L2 pronunciation to have an identical intonation contour to the native model, but indicates that correct lexical pitch patterns make a significant impact on the pitch contour of a sentence in Japanese and is worthy to instruct learners carefully.