One system or two? Evidence from cross-language lexical prosodic transfer

Abstract

Whether L1 and L2 are processed by one or two systems has been a focus of debate for many years. The current study examines this issue by investigating the possibility of cross-language prosodic transfer among Cantonese-English bilinguals. Also, the underlying pathways or theoretical accounts, namely the acoustic and linguistic hypotheses for prosodic transfer have been tested. A total of 27 Cantonese-English bilingual and 27 English monolingual second and third graders have been evaluated for their Cantonese lexical tone sensitivity, English lexical stress sensitivity, general auditory sensitivity and working memory. Independent t-tests revealed that the two groups performed equally well on English stress perception, general auditory processing and working memory. Correlational analysis revealed an association between Cantonese lexical tone and English lexical stress sensitivities even after controlling for general auditory sensitivity. General auditory sensitivity, however, showed no significant correlation with either Cantonese lexical tone or English lexical stress sensitivity. The results suggest the occurrence of prosodic transfer among tone and stress, implying that L1 tone and L2 stress are not processed by completely separate systems. Furthermore, collective evidences suggest that the prosodic transfer is mediated by their linguistic but not acoustic features, which is consistent with the linguistic hypothesis regarding the underlying pathway for prosodic transfer. In addition, collective evidences implied the role of prosodic transfer in helping bilinguals achieve native-like L2 stress perception. Our findings regarding prosodic transfer not only inform the bilingual research field the importance of suprasegmental perception, but also lend our support to the holistic view of a classic and ongoing debate about “one system or two”.