Prosodic patterns of noun phrases in English, Mandarin and L2 English

This study focuses on the prosodic patterns of noun phrases (NP) in English, Mandarin and L2 English so as to find out the prosodic similarities and differences between English and Mandarin as well as the effects of the prosody of L1 Mandarin on the acquisition of L2 English NP prosody. The results reveal that English NPs usually have one IP for the NPs with pre-modifiers and two IPs for those with post-modifiers, and the tonicity is on the head noun with a falling tone pattern of H*+L 0%. In contrast, Mandarin NPs are usually chunked into two or more IPs when there are one or more modifiers between the determiner and head noun, and the tonicity is usually on the modifiers with an up-stepped lexical tone on nucleus accented syllables. As for Mandarin speakers’ L2 English NPs, they share more typical prosodic patterns of L1 Mandarin NPs demonstrating a strong transfer from L1 prosodic system.