The Production of English Question Intonation by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

This study investigates how Cantonese and Mandarin speakers use intonation to distinguish English declarative questions and statements as compared to the production by English native speakers. Results show that as English native speakers, EFL (English as a foreign language) learners vary pitch accent and boundary tone to distinguish English declarative questions and statements. However, speakers with different language backgrounds differ in their variation of sentence pitch range and the pitch range in the final word. English native speakers use the change of sentence pitch range and sentence-final word pitch range as cues for English declarative questions regardless of sentence length and the number of syllables (monosyllabic or trisyllabic) in the final word. Cantonese speakers' use of sentence pitch range is similar to that of native speakers, but they vary the pitch range of the final word to distinguish declarative questions and statements only when the sentences end with a trisyllabic word. By comparison, Mandarin speakers only vary sentence pitch range to distinguish declarative questions and statements when the sentences are comparatively short, and the pitch range of the final word when the word is monosyllabic. These results show that the production of English declarative questions by Cantonese and Mandarin speakers is influenced by their first or second language.

I. Introduction

Intonation is “the use of suprasegmental phonetic features to convey post-lexical or sentence-level pragmatic meanings in a linguistically structured way[1]”. Speakers' right use of intonation can assist the listeners in processing the meaning of utterances quickly, otherwise listeners' recognition of speech will be delayed [2]. Therefore, it should be attached importance to in the second language (L2) acquisition, otherwise students may produce unnatural and even unintelligible speech.