Discourse Prosody Planning in L1 and L2 English

L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin discourselength English speech data extracted from the TWNAESOP corpus was analyzed using a perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework in order to investigate similarities and differences in the organization of discourse-level speech planning in English across L1 (native) and L2 (non-native) speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse units and boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly. Between-group differences in discourse units were also found through the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These findings can be attributed to the size and scope of speech planning and chunking, whereby L2 speakers, possibly due to on-line processing limitations in L2, use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in prosodic discourse organization. Future cross-L1 comparisons will investigate whether these differences represent L2-universal processing limitations and strategies.