How not to acquire tone: Cross-linguistic influence in prosody

Abstract

<p>This chapter considers how cross-linguistic influence at the prosodic level contributes to difficulty in mastering the tones of Cantonese for bilingual children and adult second language learners. Children acquiring English and Cantonese simultaneously apply prosodic templates from English to Cantonese, treating Cantonese bisyllabic words as trochaic with a high-low pattern overriding the lexical tones. The high-low pattern corresponding to stressed and unstressed syllables in English is also seen in L2 learners of Cantonese: in a case study of a fluent L2 speaker with English as L1, the high level tone 1 was frequently substituted for other target tones, following the English strong-weak template. There was also evidence of falling intonation patterns undergoing transfer, resulting in non-target low and low falling tones. These non-target patterns are interpreted as instances of cross-linguistic influence at the prosodic level. Stressed syllables in English overlap phonetically with high tone syllables in Cantonese, consistent with the role of structural overlap as a source of cross-linguistic influence.<br></p>