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The selection of intonation contours by Chinese L2 speakers of Dutch: Orthographic closure vs. prosodic knowledge

Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese participants selected the most appropriate version less often than the native speakers, and their selections from the three less appropriate competitors were more chaotic than those of the control group. The performance of the more proficient Chinese participants (as established in an independent test) was closer to that of the native speakers than the performance by the less proficient participants. Chinese participants employed a policy to assign rising contours to orthographic sentences closed by a question mark and falling contours to other sentences. In addition, they avoided choosing intonation contours ending in downstepped falling pitch and falling–rising pitch, pitch contours that are uncommon in their native language. The general acquisition profile follows findings in other areas of linguistic competence in that their performance correlated with age of arrival, not with either age or length of time they had been exposed to Dutch. As far as we are aware, this is the first systematic investigation of second language (L2) learners’ competence in melody selection.