mandarin-accented dutch prosody

247 Pages·2012·12.8 MB·English

MANDARIN-ACCENTED

DUTCH PROSODY
Published by
LOT phone: [phone]
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3512 BL Utrecht e-mail: [email protected]
The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl

Cover illustration: Photo taken by the author. The text translates as
“Windmill in the Netherlands photographed by He Xuliang in 2008 (the
time the project began).”

ISBN: 978-94-6093-093-5

NUR: 616

COPYRIGHT © 2012: XULIANG HE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
MANDARIN-ACCENTED DUTCH PROSODY

Een wetenschappelijke proeve op het gebied van de Letteren

Proefschrift

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor
aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. mr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann,
volgens besluit van het College van Decanen
in het openbaar te verdedigen op 3 december 2012
om 10.30 uur precies

door

Xuliang He

geboren op 9 augustus 1971
te Huanggang, provincie Hubei, China
Promotiecommissie

Promotores: Prof. dr. C. H. M. Gussenhoven
Prof. dr. V. J. J. P. van Heuven
(Leiden University)

Overige leden: Prof. dr. A. H. Neijt (chair)
Prof. dr. J. Peters
(Oldenburg University, Germany)
Prof. dr. Hua Chen
(Nanjing University, China)
Acknowledgements

At the final phase of the writing, I find it difficult to write this part. I am
indebted to so many people that I do not know how to express my
gratitude to them in words. They lent me a helpful hand on many
occasions and in different manners. Without their generous help,
finishing the project would not have been possible.

To begin with, I would like to Professor Hua Chen, who first led me into
the field of phonological acquisition and encouraged me to apply for a
Ph.D. position at Radboud University Nijmegen. I am also most grateful
to my dissertation supervisors. I greatly appreciate Professor Carlos
Gussenhoven’s support from the very beginning until the end of this
project. I am grateful for the time he patiently spent checking the
labellings and reading my work, and for always being ready to offer his
guidance when needed. I am grateful to my second supervisor, Professor
Vincent van Heuven for his patient guidance, revision of papers and for
statistical help.

I am also thankful to Professor Anneke Neijt, Professor Jörg Peters and
Professor Hua Chen for being willing to serve as members of my
manuscript committee and for their valuable comments.

I also benefited from discussions with colleagues in the phonology group.
I thank Judith Hanssen for her preparation of the Dutch corpus, the
Dutch data and her recordings for the experiments. I thank Joop
Kerkhoff for technical support. I thank Professor Jörg Peters for his
adaption of the story ’t Winterkoninkje, which I used in the second
perception experiment. I am thankful to Professor Roeland van Hout
and Dr. Frans van der Slik for their statistical help. I am grateful to all of
the participants who agreed to take part in my experiments, and not only
for their participation, but also for taking a genuine interest.

I would like to express my thanks to my two supervisors and Professor
Anneke Neijt for judging the Dutch proficiency of Chinese participants.
I would like to thank my colleagues in the secretary’s office of the
Linguistics Department of Radboud University Nijmegen: Hella, Christel,
vi XULIANG HE, MANDARIN-ACCENTED DUTCH PROSODY
and Wies, who were always warm-hearted and resourceful. I would like
to thank the Faculty of Arts of the university for their financial support,
which allowed me to attend workshops, linguistic schools and academic
conferences all over the country and the world. This gave me a great deal
of academic and linguistic experience and contributed directly to the
development of this dissertation.

I got help from Dr. Yi Xu, who generously gave me his Chinese research
data of four tones. Dr. Johanneke Caspers sent me several papers which
I needed in the writing the thesis. I am very grateful to them.

I am thankful to people with whom I could talk about the work on
different occasions at work or at conferences, so that I was able to clarify
my ideas. For that I especially thank: Yan Gu, Ishmael Kimirei, Rongjia
Cui, Wencui Zhou and Liusheng Wang.

As grateful as I am for the help of all those mentioned above, none of
them is to be blamed for the flaws in this dissertation.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my family. I could not have done
this without the constant love, support and encouragement from my
wife, parents and siblings.

This project was part of the research programme Intonation in Varieties of Dutch, awarded
by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO project number 360-
70-180), and was co-funded by the Arts Faculty of Radboud University Nijmegen.
Preface

Language is mysterious.

In 2003, I went to work in Nantong University, which borders on the
Wu and Jianghuai Mandarin Dialect areas, after I had completed my
three-year MA programme in Xi’an, a city in the north-west of the
Zhongyuan Dialect area. When I talked with the students there, they
assumed I was from the northern part of China, because they thought I
spoke with a northern accent. But I spoke, or intended to speak, in the
Standard Chinese pronunciation (Putonghua). During my stay in Xi’an, I
had been told I spoke with a strong southern accent. When the teacher
of a course in ‘translation’ commented on a presentation of mine, he said
my English was easier to understand than my Chinese. After having been
away for about ten years from my hometown – a small town whose
dialect is influenced by Jianghuai Mandarin and the Gan Dialect – my
relatives teased me, because I could not speak the local dialect well
enough when I visited my relatives in my hometown. How mysterious
language is! Language intrigued me. At that time, I dreamed of studying
speech and uncovering its mysterious veil someday.

Luckily enough, Professor Hua Chen, the first Chinese scholar who
applied modern computer technology to the study of how Chinese
learners speak English, introduced me to the field of phonological
acquisition. Enlightened by the literature on phonetics and phonology
she gave to her work team, I began to work for her research project.
Later, I got the Ph.D. position in the Netherlands to work on the sub-
programme ‘Mandarin-accented Dutch’ of the research programme
‘Intonation of Varieties of Dutch’ (NWO 360-70-180, 2006-2010) with
Professor Carlos Gussenhoven as the principal investigator.

In the sub-programme, I studied the prosody in Dutch by Chinese
speakers who live in the Netherlands but originally hailed from areas of
Mandarin dialects in Mainland China. Geographically, they are from
places around Beijing. The research questions are: How do they
accentuate words in Dutch sentences? How do they produce different
viii XULIANG HE, MANDARIN-ACCENTED DUTCH PROSODY
intonation contours some of which do not exist in Mandarin? Do
speakers of Mandarin, a tone language, transfer their native-language (L1)
knowledge to their target language (L2) Dutch? Do learners with higher
proficiency in Dutch perform better than the ones with lower
proficiency? Are the findings in line with previous findings in this general
field? Five experiments (two perception tests and three production tests)
were designed to answer the questions. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 give an
account of the two perception tests. The former is on pitch accents in
Dutch sentences and the latter is on the acceptability of Dutch
intonation patterns in a fable for children. Chapter 4, 5 and 6 describe
the three production tests. Chapter 4 deals with unconstrained read-
aloud production intended to study melodic choices. Chapters 5 and 6
are about controlled speech production after a brief training session
before recording. Chapter 5 studies the phonetic strategies adopted by
speakers in the production of melodies (H*L L%; L*H H%; H*L H%)
under time pressure created by phonologically different vowels and
codas. Chapter 6 studies the effects of three types of focus (broad focus,
narrow focus, and corrective focus) in falling intonation contours (H*L
L%). The last chapter is the summary.

Though I have finished the project, I do not feel I removed the
mysterious veil, even though I may have lifted one of two corners. I still
have long way to go.
Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................v

PREFACE..........................................................................................................vii

1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................1
1.1 Rationale of the research.........................................................................1
1.2 Chinese dialects........................................................................................3
1.3 ToDI and Standard Dutch.....................................................................8
1.4 Relevant issues.......................................................................................12
1.4.1 Perception and production............................................................13
1.4.2 Models of phonological acquisition.............................................14
1.4.2.1 Best’s PAM................................................................................15
1.4.2.2 Kuhl’s NLMM..........................................................................16
1.4.2.3 Flege’s SLM...............................................................................17
1.4.2.4 Major’s OPM.............................................................................19
1.4.2.5 Eckman’s MDH and SCH......................................................20
1.4.2.6 Optimality Theory....................................................................21
1.4.3 The age issue...................................................................................24
1.5 Structure of the thesis...........................................................................25
1.6 References..............................................................................................27

2 CHOOSING THE OPTIMAL PITCH ACCENT LOCATION IN DUTCH.....37
2.1 Introduction..........................................................................................37
2.2 Method..................................................................................................42
2.2.1 Materials..........................................................................................42
2.2.2 Participants.....................................................................................42
2.2.2.1 General information ...............................................................42
2.2.2.2 Proficiency ratings .................................................................43
2.2.3 Procedure.....................................................................................44
2.3 Data analysis and discussion..............................................................44
2.3.1 Analysis and discussion of correctness scores..........................44
2.3.2 Analysis and discussion of confidence scores...........................49
2.3.3 Other factors correlated with correctness scores and
confidence scores..........................................................................49
2.4 Conclusions...........................................................................................50
2.5 References.............................................................................................52
x XULIANG HE, MANDARIN-ACCENTED DUTCH PROSODY
3 THE SELECTION OF INTONATION CONTOURS BY CHINESE L2
SPEAKERS OF DUTCH: ORTHOGRAPHIC CLOSURE VS PROSODIC
KNOWLEDGE..........................................................................................55
3.1 Introduction......................................................................................55
3.1.1 Intonation in West Germanic languages and tones in Chinese
......................................................................................................55
3.1.2 Research on prosodic production and perception................63
3.1.3 Research questions.....................................................................65
3.2 Method................................................................................................67
3.2.1 Material.......................................................................................67
3.2.2 Participants................................................................................69
3.2.3 Procedure..................................................................................69
3.3 Data analysis.......................................................................................70
3.3.1 Overall analysis .......................................................................71
3.3.2 An orthographic strategy........................................................73
3.3.3 Overall contour preferences...................................................74
3.3.4 Correlations with speaker variables.......................................76
3.4 Conclusions........................................................................................76
3.5 References...........................................................................................79

4 A PROSODIC ANALYSIS OF MANDARIN-ACCENTED DUTCH
INTONATIONAL IDIOMS............................................................................85
4.1 Introduction..........................................................................................85
4.2 Phrasing.................................................................................................86
4.3 Pitch range............................................................................................88
4.4 Speech rhythm......................................................................................89
4.5 Speech rate and articulation rate........................................................92
4.6 Pitch accents ........................................................................................93
4.7 Intonation contours.............................................................................95
4.2 Method..................................................................................................96
4.2.1 Materials..........................................................................................96
4.2.2 Procedure........................................................................................99
4.2.2.1 Subjects.....................................................................................99
4.2.2.2 Labellings...............................................................................100
4.2.2.3 Variables.................................................................................101
4.3 Results..................................................................................................101
4.3.1 Phrasing........................................................................................101
4.3.2 Pitch range....................................................................................104
4.3.3 Speech rate and articulation rate...............................................106
4.3.4 Speech rhythm.............................................................................107