Intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by English speakers

Abstract

This study investigated intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by Australian English speakers and the influence of their first language (L1) prosody on their intonation of Japanese sentences. The second language (L2) intonation is a complicated product of the L1 transfer at two levels of prosodic hierarchy: at word level and at phrase levels, and retain the characteristics of L1 with marked features of the target language unacquired until the late stage of acquisition. Under this hypothesis, Intonation contours were acoustically measured and compared with native speakers' intonation.