Intonation of Japanese sentences spoken by English speakers

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. L2 speech is hypothesized to retain the characteristics of L1, and to gain marked features of the target language only during the late stage of acquisition. Investigation of this hypothesis involved acoustic measurement of L2 speakers’ intonation contours, and comparison of these contours with those of native speakers.