Prosodic marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin by Chinese speakers / Jiang Man

Jiang , Man (2022) Prosodic marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin by Chinese speakers / Jiang Man. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Second language speakers have been found to face difficulties marking prosodic features of new and given information in English. English is a stress-based language, where lexical and sentence stress can reflect different meanings. On the other hand, Mandarin is a tone language in which differences in pitch (auditory perception of relative frequency) that refers to the highness or lowness of voice can give different meanings to words made up of the same vowels and consonants. Chinese learners who are learning English as a foreign language are likely to speak English with different intonation patterns from first language speakers, which can lead to misinterpretations of the message conveyed. However, there is a dearth of research on the prosodic marking of new and given information by Chinese English speakers and on the extent to which Mandarin might influence the marking of new and given information. To begin to fill this research gap, an empirical study of the prosodic features of English and Mandarin was conducted using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the prosodic marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin by Chinese speakers. The speakers comprised five postgraduate students who were majoring in English. They were recorded reading two texts, one in English and the other in Chinese. Each text contained eight pairs of target words representing new and given information respectively. The recordings were then acoustically analysed using Praat. The results indicate that the patterns of marking of new and given information in English and Mandarin were similar. new information tended to have longer duration, higher F0, and a larger pitch range. However, the difference in pitch range between new and given information was found to be greater in English than in Mandarin.

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