Increasing context: L2 production of English intonation by L1 Mandarin and L1 Spanish speakers

One of the uncontested linguistic uses of intonation is the marking of sentence-type. Intonation, however, can be a redundant cue to sentence type, as in English statements or absolute yes-no questions, or the only cue, as in declarative questions. We explore the realization of sentence prosody by advanced Spanish and Mandarin learners of English. Since the target-like realization of sentence prosody involves the acquisition of phonetic and semantic properties, we compared the production of statements, absolute questions and declarative questions of the experimental groups using an elicited imitation task and a contextual sentence production task that differed in the amount of contextual information provided. Both tasks yielded different patterns of cross-linguistic influence. In the elicited imitation task, differences were restricted to the phonetic realization of pitch accents. In the second task, syntactic (merger of two questions) and phonetic differences (pitch excursion size) emerged.