Swedish word accent production by L2-speakers with different tonal L1s

This study addresses the question of whether L1-speakers of Vietnamese – a tone language – and L1-speakers of Somali – a language with tonal accents – differ in degree of accuracy when producing words that carry either of the two tonal accents in L2-Swedish. Some previous studies suggest that it is an advantage when discriminating between different tones in another tone language, if a speaker’s L1 is also a tone language; while others show that this may not necessarily be the case. Accuracy was studied with the help of identification tests, and the results for the L2-speakers were matched with the results for L1-speakers. It is revealed that no adequate distinction is made between the tone accents by either of the two groups of L2-speakers. The two tonal patterns are equally often obscured by L1-speakers of Somali, whereas speakers of L1-Vietamese produced patterns that were more frequently identified as one of the Swedish word accents, but not the other one.