Intonational Differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that characteristics of a person’s first language (L1) may transfer to a second language (L2). The current study looks at the extent to which this holds for aspects of intonation as well. More specifically, we investigate to what extent traces of the L1 can be discerned in the way intonation is used in the L2 for two functions: (1) to highlight certain words by making them sound more prominent and (2) to signal continuation or finality in a list by manipulating the speech melody. To this end, the article presents an explorative study into the way focus and boundaries are marked prosodically in Zulu, and it also compares such prosodic functions in two variants of English in South Africa, i.e., English spoken as an L1, and English spoken as an L2/additional language by speakers who have Zulu as their L1. The latter language is commonly referred to as Black South African English. This comparison is interesting from a typological perspective, as Zulu is intonationally different from English, especially in the way prosody is exploited for signalling informationally important stretches of speech. Using a specific elicitation procedure, we found in a first study that speakers of South African English (as L1) mark focused words and position within a list by intonational means, just as in other L1 varieties of English, whereas Zulu only uses intonation for marking continuity or finality. A second study focused on speakers of Black South African English, and compared the prosody of proficient versus less proficient speakers. We found that the proficient speakers were perceptually equivalent to L1 speakers of English in their use of intonation for marking focus and boundaries. The less proficient speakers marked boundaries in a similar way as L1 speakers of English, but did not use prosody for signalling focus, analogous to what is typical of their native language. Acoustic observations match these perceptual results.

Accent shifts in spoken noun phrases affect verification latencies of listeners in Dutch but not Canadian French

“…Similar observations have been made for utterances of speakers who use English as their second language and whose intonation structure is affected by the accent distributions of their first language (Swerts & Zerbian, 2010). Counter-evidence against the alleged universality of flexible accent distributions becomes even more obvious from looking at languages that are typologically very distinct from English, and that also differ in other levels of linguistic structure, such as in a number of Bantu languages (Downing, 2008) and Arabic (Hellmuth, 2005(Hellmuth, , 2009, or in languages such as Japanese in which the presence or absence of an accent is lexically determined (Pierrehumbert & Beckman, 1988).…”

“…From production studies (e.g. Rasier & Hiligsman, 2007;Swerts & Zerbian, 2010), we know that one can sometimes hear prosodic traces of one language in the second language of that speaker, especially if the speaker is not yet fluent with respect to that second language. Along the same lines, it would be worth exploring how listeners whose L1 is a plastic language, would process incoming speech of their L2 with varying accent structures that are not typical for that second language.…”

Prosodic marking of narrow focus across varieties of South African English

“…Again, by controlling whether the object noun or the colour adjective had to be corrected, focus varied in the modified noun phrases that the participants provided as answers. The tasks followed the methodology in Swerts and Zerbian (2010). 1 The two modified noun phrases yellow ruler and yellow wallet were chosen for acoustic analysis, due to comparable syllable structure and their occurrence in both the first and second task.…”

“…The question arises whether this has to be interpreted as a lack of prosodic focus marking, or whether focus is marked by different acoustic cues beyond F0 and intensity. The perception study by Swerts and Zerbian (2010) addresses this question. It used target phrases comparable to the ones elicited in the current study from the spectrum of speakers of (Bl)SAfE.…”

“…It was necessary to re-elicit the data from Swerts and Zerbian (2010). The target phrases from the earlier study (namely blue star and red cow) did not lend themselves to acoustic analysis due to their segmental make-up and their monosyllabicity which leads to tonal crowding as pitch accent and boundary tone are realized on the same syllable.…”