Acquisition of Mandarin Lexical Tones: The Effect of Global Pitch Tendency

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2014.12.007

摘要/Abstract

摘要： This paper discusses the acquisition of Mandarin lexical tones by American second language (L2) learners. The analysis of the tone errors in the reading passage and the spontaneous speech showed that the surface Tone 4 error is the most frequent at the prosodic word (PW)-initial position in both the intermediate and the advanced learner groups. Attempts were made to account for this tone error pattern within some second language acquisition (SLA) frameworks, but in vain. It was argued that this tone error pattern may be due to the high pitch tendency at the phrase- or sentence-initial position in speech. Although this is more of a general pattern across languages, the production of such a tendency by L2 learners superseded the underlying tones, hence the surface Tone 4 errors. The special status of Tone 4 in L2 speech corresponds to the special status of the same tone in the first language (L1) speech (Wan, 2007). However, it was cautioned that such similarity should not be taken as evidence for the similarity in L1 and L2 acquisition in that different processes are involved in L1 and L2 production.

关键词: Tone acquisition, Mandarin Chinese, Tone 4 (falling tone), prosodic word (PW)-initial position

CHUNSHENG YANG. Acquisition of Mandarin Lexical Tones: The Effect of Global Pitch Tendency[J]. 当代外语研究, 2014, 14(12): 77-91.

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