Acquisition of second language intonation

Foreign accents in second language (L2) production are caused by the phonological system and phonetic realization of the first language (L1), including both segmental and prosodic features. This paper examines the intonation structure of Seoul Korean and its realization by American English speakers. Four English speakers of Korean, differing in fluency, and two Korean speakers participated. Thirty-six sentences were designed to test the realization of prosodic structure, focus, and intonation patterns by varying the number of syllables within a word and a sentence, and conditions for the segment–tone interaction. Preliminary results show that, as in segmental data, more advanced L2 speakers produced more nativelike intonation pattern and prosodic structure than less advanced ones. Advanced L2 speakers were better in grouping words into phrases and producing the phrase-final high tone than less advanced speakers, but they still produced English-like pitch accents following English stress rules, suggesting that a lexically linked prosodic feature is hard to suppress. In addition, less advanced L2 speakers more often produced each word in one intonation phrase, reflecting a limitation of information processing as found in L1 acquisition. Finally, more advanced speakers distinguished the segmentally triggered tones better than less advanced speakers but with large variation.