Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T17:29:42.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

COMPREHENSION OF FOCUS-TO-ACCENTUATION MAPPING IN SENTENCES WITH ONLY BY ADVANCED CANTONESE LEARNERS AND DUTCH LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2020

Haoyan Ge Open the ORCID record for Haoyan Ge [Opens in a new window] ,
Aoju Chen  and
Virginia Yip
Haoyan Ge*
Affiliation:
The Open University of Hong Kong
Aoju Chen
Affiliation:
Utrecht University
Virginia Yip
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Haoyan Ge, School of Education and Languages, The Open University of Hong Kong, Ho Man Tin, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. E-mail:hge@ouhk.edu.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates L2 comprehension of focus-to-accentuation mapping in English sentences with focus particle only by advanced learners of English whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch. Two experiments were conducted to examine (a) whether L2 learners could map accentuation to focus; and (b) whether they could perceive accentuation in English sentences. Results show that accentuation played little role in Cantonese learners’ comprehension of focus, whereas it affected how accurately and quickly Dutch learners and native controls comprehended focus. Dutch learners were even more efficient than native controls in comprehending focus-to-accentuation mapping. Furthermore, both L2 groups could successfully perceive accentuation in English sentences. These findings suggest that multiple interfaces might not be equally problematic for L2 learners with different L1s, and convergence at multiple interfaces in L2 is possible. The comprehension difficulty observed in Cantonese learners can be attributed to their less detailed representation of focus-to-accentuation mapping in L2.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 25 - 49
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We would like to thank Tracy Au, James Britton, Alex Brouwer, Julia Fan, Rachida Ganga, Hannah Lam, Kay Wong, Riki Wu, and Alice Zhu for their assistance with various aspects of the study. We also gratefully acknowledge our participants, as well as the lab support from the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics-OTS, the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, and the University of Cambridge-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism. We have benefited from the discussion with Stephen Matthews, Roumyana Slabakova, Patrick Wong, Iris Mulders, Yanhui Zhang, Lawrence Cheung, Xin Kang, Xiangjun Deng, Mengru Han, Ziyin Mai, and Jiangling Zhou. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

References

REFERENCES

Akker, E., & Cutler, A. (2003). Prosodic cues to semantic structure in native and nonnative listening. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 81–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Kliegl, R., Vasishth, S., & Baayen, H. (2015a). Parsimonious mixed models. http:// arxiv.org/abs/1506.04967Google Scholar
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015b). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, A., Bennati, E., & Sorace, A. (2007). Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 25, 657.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birch, S., & Clifton, C. (1995). Focus, accent, and argument structure: Effects on language comprehension. Language and Speech, 38, 365–391.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Calhoun, S. (2010). The centrality of metrical structure in signaling information structure: A probabilistic perspective. Language, 86, 1–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Li, C. N. (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 225–255). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chao, Y. R. (1947). Cantonese primer. Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, A. (2010). Is there really an asymmetry in the acquisition of the focus-to-accentuation mapping? Lingua, 120, 1926–1939.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifton, C. Jr., & Frazier, L. (2016). Focus in corrective exchanges: Effects of pitch accent and syntactic form. Language and Speech, 59, 544–561.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Filiaci, F., Sorace, A., & Carreiras, M. (2014). Anaphoric biases of null and overt subjects in Italian and Spanish: A cross-linguistic comparison. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 825–843.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gennari, S., Meroni, P. L., & Crain, S. (2004). Rapid relief of stress in dealing with ambiguity. In Trueswell, J., & Tanenhaus, M. (Eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions (pp. 245–259). MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gu, W. & Lee, T. (2007). Effects of tonal context and focus on Cantonese F0. Proceedings of 16th International Conference Phonetic Science, Saarbrucken, Germany, pp. 1033–1036.Google Scholar
Gualmini, A., Maciukaite, S., & Crain, S. (2002). Children’s insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with ONLY. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 8.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (1983). On the grammar and semantics of sentence accents. Foris.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (2006). Types of focus in English. In Lee, C., Gordon, M., & Büring, D. (Eds.) Topic and focus: Cross-linguistic perspectives on meaning and intonation (pp. 83–100). Kluwer.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2009). The syntax-discourse interface in near-native L2 acquisition: Off-line and on-line performance. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 463–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ito, K. (2002). Ambiguity in broad focus and narrow focus interpretation in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Speech Prosody (SP2002) (pp. 411–414). Aix-en-Provence.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. R. (1980). The structure of intonational meaning: Evidence from English. Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Liu, F. (2009). Intonation systems of Mandarin and English: A functional approach. (PhD dissertation). University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Lozano, C. (2006). The development of the syntax–discourse interface: Greek learners of Spanish. In Torrens, V., & Escobar, L. (Eds.), The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages (pp. 371–399). John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Man, V.C. (2002). Focus effects on Cantonese tones: An acoustic study. Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Speech Prosody, Aix-en-Provence, France, pp. 467–470.Google Scholar
Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2011). Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. Routledge.Google Scholar
Mulders, I., & Szendröi, K. (2016). Early association of prosodic focus with alleen “only”: Evidence from eye movements in the visual-world paradigm. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ortega-Llebaria, M., & Colantoni, L. (2014). L2 English intonation: Relations between form-meaning associations, access to meaning, and L1 transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36, 331–353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rasier, L., Caspers, J., & Heuven, V. (2010). Accentual marking of information status in Dutch and French as foreign languages: Production and perception. New Sounds 2010. The 6th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech , Poznan, Poland, pp. 379–385.Google Scholar
Rasier, L., & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2: Theoretical and methodological issues. Nouveaux Cahiers de Linguistique Française, 28, 41–66.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Google Scholar
Revelle, W. (2019). psych: Procedures for Psychological, Psychometric, and Personality Research. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. R package version 1.9.12. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=psych.Google Scholar
Roberts, L., Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2008). Online pronoun resolution in L2 discourse. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30, 333–357.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shyu, S.-I. (2010). Focus interpretation of zhi “only” associated arguments in Mandarin triadic constructions. Linguistics, 48, 671–716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slabakova, R., Kempchinsky, P., & Rothman, J. (2012). Clitic-doubled left dislocation and focus fronting in L2 Spanish: A case of successful acquisition at the syntax–discourse interface. Second Language Research, 28, 319–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A. (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1, 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22, 339–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A., & Serratrice, L. (2009). Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 195–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swerts, M., & Zerbian, S. (2010). Intonational differences between L1 and L2 English in South Africa. Phonetica, 67, 127–146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Trommelem, M., & Zonneveld, W. (1999). Word stress in Western Germanic languages. In van der Hulst, H. (Ed.), Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe (pp. 478–515). Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Tsimpli, I., Sorace, A., Heycock, C., & Filiaci, F. (2004). First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 8, 257–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Valenzuela, E. (2006). L2 end state grammars and incomplete acquisition of the Spanish CLLD constructions. In Slabakova, R., Montrul, S., & Prévost, P. (Eds.), Inquiries in linguistic development: In honor of Lydia White (pp. 283–304). John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, B., & Xu, Y. (2011). Differential prosodic encoding of topic and focus in sentence-initial position in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Phonetics, 39, 595–611.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, L. (2011). Second language acquisition at the interfaces. Lingua, 121, 577–590.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, W., & Xu, Y. (2010). Prosodic focus in Hong Kong Cantonese without post-focus compression. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference Speech Prosody, Chicago, pp. 1–4.Google Scholar
Xu, Y., Chen, S., & Wang, B. (2012). Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression: A typological divide within the same language family? The Linguistics Review, 29, 131–147.Google Scholar
Yan, M., & Calhoun, S. (2019). Priming effects of focus in Mandarin Chinese. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1985.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zubizarreta, M. L. (2016). Nuclear stress and information structure. In Fery, C. & Ishihara, S. (Eds.) The Oxford handbook of information structure (pp. 165–184). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar