Global F0 features of Mandarin L2 English — Reflection of higher level planning difficulties from discourse association and information structure

It has been reported that one major feature of global prosody in continuous speech is to express cross-phrase association and cohesion through adjustment of individual phrase intonations. Another major feature of global prosody that also requires phrase intonation to adjust is to express information structure. Both features involve multi-level large scale speech planning; their interactions multifaceted. These higher level prosodic expressions are systematic and predictable in LI speech, but these expressions are realized in L2 speech that can be attributed to foreign accent remains unknown. The current acoustic study thus attempts to address these two issues through corpus analysis with focus on normalization procedures that remove respective interactions in order to derive pattern that better reflect each feature involved. The global FO constitution of LI vs. Mandarin L2 English is compared to see the difference. As expected, respective positive correlations and patterns can be derived from LI speech whereas divergent patterns found in L2 speech provide explanations of L2 accent. Overall cumulative effects of interaction further account for how both features collectively contribute to accent specific to Mandarin L2 English. These findings are readily applicable to CALL that targets global prosody training.