Doctoral Dissertation Research: Acquisition and Processing of Pitch Accents: A Cross-linguistic Study of English and Japanese Second Language Learners

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This dissertation investigates second language (L2) use of prosody--the "rhythm" and "melody" of sentences--to convey and comprehend Information Structure. In English, contrastive information ("Did Mariana make the apple bread?"-"Mariana made the BANANA bread.") and new information ("What did Mariana make?"-"Mariana made the BANANA bread.") are emphasized with higher pitch and longer duration, whereas old information is deaccented ("Who made the banana bread?"-"Mariana made the banana bread."). Contrastive information and new information are differentiated by tune of pitch: the former with low tone followed by high tone, the latter with high plateau tone. In Tokyo-Japanese, by contrast, presence or absence of pitch indicates word meaning ("a'me" 'rain' vs. "ame" 'candy'), not Information Structure. In light of these differences, this bi-directional study examines whether Target Language prosodic perception is modulated by native language (L1) properties and how L2 learners develop prosodic marking of Information Structure. L1-Japanese learners of English and L1-English learners of Japanese are tested on 3 prosodies--contrastive pitch, regular high pitch, deaccentuation--and their link to Information Structure: (1) a perception task in which naturalness of pitch and duration vis-a-vis information status is rated; (2) a dyadic picture-coloring production task, manipulating information status of colors and drawing instruments ("Color the dog with the blue spray / blue pen / red pen. Now color the cat with the red pen."); (3) a comprehension task, the listening counterpart to task (2), utilizing eyetracking.This is the first investigation of L2 prosody that systematically manipulates and analyzes prosodic details and tests L2 learners' perception, production, and comprehension in well-controlled, contextualized experiments. Since very little is known about L2 learners' use of prosodic information, the project could serve as an important data source for formulating an L2 acquisition theory of prosody and help set an L2 agenda for higher-level phonological acquisition/processing/teaching.