Where and how to make an emphasis? - L2 distinct prosody and why

It has been reported in the literature that L2 English prosody differs from L1 at the lexical, syntactic and discourse levels; characterized by under-differentiated word stress and narrow focus as well as smaller discourse units, respectively. Using continuous speech data of L1 TW Mandarin, L1 English and TW L2 English, the present study compares informationstructure related L2 prosody through emphasis placement in phrases and in multi-phrase paragraphs. Results show that TW L2 English is marked by fewer and less varied emphasis patterns while emphasis placement is only related to one specific genre of L1 Mandarin. Acoustic analyses also reveal that the contrast strength of L2 produced emphases is again less robust and therefore under-differentiated than L1. These findings suggest that sources of L2 prosody are multi-fold, contributions from constraints of speech planning at lexical, sentential and discourse and information levels may all take part. We believe our findings can be applied to L2 English teaching as well as CALL technology development.