L3 prosody: Cross-linguistic transfer of prosodic features in Mandarin and English by Cantonese multilinguals

Cross-linguistic transfer direction of phonological features among L1, L2, and L3 of a multilingual depends indispensably on the proficiency levels of L2 and L3. Cantonese speakers in Guangdong Province, China have Mandarin as L2 and English as L3, while Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong usually have English as L2 and Mandarin as L3. It was hypothesized that the existence of neutral tone in Mandarin and the absence of this feature in Cantonese may impact the duration of unstressed syllables in English; and the larger pitch range of Mandarin tone and the relatively smaller pitch range of Cantonese tone may exhibit influence on the pitch height of English stressed syllables. The study analyzed English and Mandarin speech data collected from 12 Hong Kong speakers and 12 Guangdong speakers for pitch range, pitch height, and syllable duration ratio. The results revealed similarities and differences in prosodic feature transfer across the three languages between the Cantonese multilinguals in Hong Kong and Guangdong Province. Copyright © 2021 L3-AIS.