Interaction of Lexical and Sentence Prosody in Taiwan L2 English

This study investigates the effect of sentence-level prosody on production of English lexical stress, comparing L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups. 4 L1 North American English speakers and 9 L1 Taiwan Mandarin speakers were asked to produce a set of 20 disyllabic and multisyllabic words embedded in three different prosodic contexts: neutral broad focus, at a phrase/sentence boundary, and in narrow focus. Results suggest that production of the prosodic cues to mark lexical stress (F0, duration and amplitude) becomes much more difficult for L2 speakers when disyllabic and multisyllabic words are embedded in higher-level prosodic contexts.