Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three Spanish intonation patterns, all involving a low tone on the nuclear accent. In a pre-post test experimental design, half of the participants received intonation training without the use of pitch gestures (the control group) while the other half received the same training but with pitch gestures representing nuclear intonation contours (the experimental group). Musical (melody, pitch) abilities were also measured. The results revealed that (a) the experimental group significantly improved intonational production outcomes, and (b) even though participants with stronger musical abilities performed better, those with weaker musical abilities benefited more from observing pitch gestures.

The term "uptalk" describes utterance-final pitch rises that carry no sentence-structural information. Uptalk is usually dialectal or sociolectal, and Australian English (AusEng) is particularly known for this attribute. We ask here whether experience with an uptalk variety affects listeners' ability to categorise rising pitch contours on the basis of the timing and height of their onset and offset. Listeners were two groups of English-speakers (AusEng, and American English, henceforth AmEng), and three groups of listeners with L2 English: one group with Mandarin as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, one with German as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, and one with German as L1 but no AusEng experience. They heard nouns (e.g., flower, piano) in the framework "Got a NOUN", each ending with a pitch rise artificially manipulated on three contrasts: low vs. high rise onset, low vs. high rise offset and early vs. late rise onset. Their task was to categorise the tokens as "question" or "statement", and we analysed the effect of the pitch contrasts on their judgements. Only the native AusEng listeners were able to use the pitch contrasts systematically in making these categorisations.

This study examined the non-truth-conditional meaning encoded by sentential-final particles and boundary tones in four Mandarin positive polar question (PPQ) patterns. Two short experiments were conducted to test (a) the role of epistemic and evidential biases (Experiment I) and (b) the antecedent and answer requirements, as well as the (non-)acceptance of the antecedent (Experiment II) in constraining the interpretation of PPQs. In each experiment, a series of situational judgment tasks (27 in Experiment I and 36 in Experiment II) were designed to elicit data from 60 native speakers. The findings suggest that the four patterns are not simple biased questions but are complex non-canonical questions whose interpretation are sensitive to the discourse configuration established by the five abovementioned contextual factors.