ACQUIRING NATIVE-LIKE INTONATION IN DUTCH AND SPANISH
Comparing the L1 and L2 of native speakers and second language learners
Lieke van Maastricht (Tilburg University)
Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg University)
Marc Swerts (Tilburg University)
1. Introduction
Learning about the interaction between the native language (L1) and the target language (L2)
has been the aim of several studies on second language acquisition (SLA). However, many of
these studies focus on the acquisition of phonology and grammar, while ignoring intonation
and other prosodic features as a possible distinguishing factor between L1 and L2 speakers.
Studies that did look into prosodic features often performed analyses based on listenerdependent judgments, rather than independent acoustic measurements (Rasier & Hiligsmann,
2009; Swerts et al., 2002) or were carried out on a rather small scale (Henriksen et al., 2010;
Mennen, 2004). Furthermore, few studies factored in the proficiency level of the L2 learners.
A study by Swerts & Zerbian (2010) on Zulu and English suggests that prosodic transfer, i.e.
the copying of certain prosodic features of the native language to the second language, is
reduced when the proficiency level of the L2 learner increases. The only study that we know
of that considered the interesting possibility of prosodic transfer from the L2 to the L1
(Mennen, 2004), dealt with analyses of formal properties of intonation and not with its
functional meaning.
In short, although prior work has looked into several aspects of the L1-L2 relationship that
seem to be relevant to SLA, no study has ever bidirectionally and systematically compared
the prosodic systems of an L1 and an L2 in a functional context, while taking into account L2
proficiency. In addition, to our knowledge we are the first to compare Dutch and Spanish,
which are especially suited for a contrastive analysis since they differ with respect to the way
they use intonation to mark information status. Dutch is a plastic language in which intonation
is used to mark focus (e.g. Rasier, 2006), therefore contextually new information generally
gets accented and given information is deaccented (Swerts et al., 2002). Spanish, however, is
a non-plastic language, which is more constrained in its use of accent distribution to reflect
the news value of the sentence elements. Roughly speaking, the pitch pattern of utterances in
broad and narrow focus is identical (Face, 2002) and the nuclear accent is placed on the last
content word of the intonational phrase (Hualde, 2005:257).
The data collected in this study might also tell us more about the typological intonation
distance between languages and consequently help us answer the question whether it is
equally difficult for speakers of Dutch to acquire the Spanish intonation pattern as it is for
speakers of Spanish to adapt to the Dutch intonation system. It is expected that it is easier for
L1 speakers of Dutch to acquire a native-like intonation in Spanish than it is for L1 speakers
of Spanish to do so for Dutch. This can be explained by the fact that Spanish has a fixed rule
for using intonation in information status marking, while in Dutch the use of a certain
intonation pattern is context-dependent (Rasier & Hiligsmann 2009).
2. Method
2.1 Participants
There were 4 groups of participants (124 in total): 26 Dutch L1 speakers (15 women, average
age 23 yrs.), who do not speak Spanish, 19 Spanish L1 speakers who do not speak Dutch (13
women, average age 25 yrs.), 40 Dutch learners of Spanish (31 women, average age 24 yrs.),
and 39 Spanish learners of Dutch (29 women, average age 36 yrs.). All were raised in a
monolingual setting and the second language learner groups were counterbalanced for
language proficiency by means of an L2 proficiency assessment following the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2012).
2.2 Stimuli
Participants were shown sequences of objects in various colors and asked to name them. The
fourth picture of each sequence was the target image (e.g. a blue donkey) and by varying the
preceding objects and their colors, the description of the participant had to coincide with one
of the following four possible types of information status: (1) New/New (NN), in which both
the first and the second word of the NP are new in the sequence (e.g. blue donkey preceded by
pink broom), (2) Given/New (GN), in which the second word of the NP differs from the
preceding NP, but the first one is the same (e.g. blue donkey preceded by blue broom), (3)
New/Given (NG), in which the first word is new in that list, but the second word corresponds
(only) with the second word in the description of the preceding picture (e.g. blue donkey,
preceded by red donkey) or (4) Given/Given (GG), in which both the first and the second
word are used to describe the preceding picture, but not any other picture in the sequence (e.g.
blue donkey, preceded by blue donkey). Four different objects were used in the study, which
resulted in 16 different target items. Every experimental item was alternated with a filler item
or an item eliciting a sentence with corrective focus.
2.3 Procedure
Experimental sessions were performed individually and took approximately 15 minutes for
the L1 speakers and 30 minutes for the L2 learners, who performed the task both in their L1
and L2. To control for possible learning effects, half of the L2 learners first performed the L1
condition and the other half started with the L2 condition. The speech recordings, made with
the internal microphone of an Apple MacBook Pro, took place in a closed off (where possible,
sound-proof) room. Each condition was preceded by a short practice session to familiarize the
participants with the type of task. Participants also filled out a basic questionnaire concerning
their personal information and the languages that they speak.
2.4 Prosodic analysis
The acoustic analysis was performed with Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2012). The target NPs
were extracted from the original wave-file and the maximum pitch (F0) in Hertz of the two
words of the NP was measured. To account for the relative difference between them, the
maximum F0 value of the first word was subtracted from the maximum pitch value of the
second word. This entails that if the second word is more prominent than the first (e.g. blue
DONKEY), this results in a positive difference score, while an NP in which the first word
receives the main prominence (e.g. in BLUE donkey) generates a negative difference value.
2.5 Results
The L1 data were analyzed with a repeated measures ANOVA with information status (4
levels: NN, GN, NG, and GG) as independent within-subject factor, and L1 (2 levels: L1
Dutch and L1 Spanish) as independent between-subject factor. Both factors exerted a
significant main effect on the difference score (in Hz). As shown in Table I, the Spanish
speakers produce positive difference scores of approximately the same size in all conditions,
whereas the difference scores of Dutch speakers vary depending on the information status of
the context. Pairwise comparisons, which were always done using the Bonferroni method,
indicate that there are no significant differences between the four information status types in
Spanish, while in Dutch the NG context differs significantly from all other contexts (p<.001).
TABLE I. Mean difference scores (and SD) in
Hertz of native speakers of Spanish and Dutch.
New/New
Given/New
New/Given
Given/Given
Native Spanish
78.074 (52.692)
76.883 (40.959)
76.427 (44.522)
80.351 (45.999)
Native Dutch
17.146 (26.578)
28.080 (30.854)
-8.117 (26.603)
30.160 (31.087)
TABLE II. Mean difference scores (and SD) in
Hertz of Spanish learners of Dutch and Dutch
learners of Spanish, to be compared with Table I.
SLD
DLS
New/New
80.443 (51.161) 19.883 (29.817)
Given/New
89.435 (49.677) 32.135 (25.881)
New/Given
74.681 (47.323) 9.922 (31.368)
Given/Given 88.134 (52.997) 29.745 (30.366)
Finally, the difference scores of the Spanish speakers are substantially higher than those of the
Dutch speakers.
The data of the Spanish learners of Dutch, shown in Table II, were analyzed with a
repeated measures ANOVA with information status (4 levels: NN, GN, NG, and GG) as
independent within-subject factor, L1 (3 levels: L1 Dutch, L1 Spanish, and L2 Dutch) as
independent between-subject factor. Both factors exerted a significant main effect on the
difference score. Post Hoc tests, which were all done using the Bonferroni method, reveal that
the data of Spanish learners of Dutch differ significantly from the data produced by Dutch
native speakers (p<.001), but not from the Spanish native speakers. This suggests that
prosodic transfer is taking place, as it shows that Spanish learners of Dutch produce
essentially the same intonation patterns in both their L1 and their L2, which do not
correspond to those found in the target language. Pairwise comparisons within language
groups confirm that transfer takes place as there are no significant differences between the
four information status types in the Dutch data produced by Spanish L2 learners, as is the case
in L1 Spanish data, while in L1 Dutch the NG context differs significantly from all others.
The results of the Dutch learners of Spanish were also analyzed by using a repeated
measures ANOVA with information status (4 levels: NN, GN, NG, and GG) as independent
within-subject factor, L1 (3 levels: L1 Dutch, L1 Spanish, and L2 Spanish) as independent
between-subject factor. Both factors exerted a significant main effect on the difference score.
Post Hoc tests show that the data of Dutch learners of Spanish differ significantly from the
data of the Spanish L1 speakers (p<.001), but not from the data by Dutch L1 speakers, which
implies that prosodic transfer also occurs in this direction. Dutch learners of Spanish produce
intonation patterns that do not correspond to those found in L1 Spanish, however they are
similar to those produced by L1 speakers of Dutch who do not speak Spanish. Pairwise
comparisons within the three language groups corroborate this claim: there is a significant
difference between the NG information status type and the GN (p<.001) and GG (p<.01)
contexts in the data of Dutch learners of Spanish, which indicates that they at least partially
copy their L1 intonation pattern to their L2. This contrasts with L1 Spanish intonation, in
which speakers produce more or less identical positive difference scores in all contexts.
4. Discussion and conclusion
This paper described the acquisition of native-like intonation in L1 and L2 Spanish and Dutch
and the possibility of prosodic transfer. We analyzed the use of pitch accents to mark
information status by L1 speakers. Our study confirms that in Dutch intonation is used to
mark information status, while in Spanish it is not. The prominence patterns produced by the
Dutch speakers match the given/new distinctions in the elicited NPs. This is especially clear
in the NG contexts, which receive a negative difference score while the other contexts have
markedly higher, positive difference scores (This reflects the difference between the
intonation pattern of ‘BLUE donkey’ vs. ‘blue DONKEY’). Conversely, the Spanish L1 speakers
produce essentially the same intonation patterns across the different contexts by always
placing the pitch accent on the second word of the NP (i.e. ‘blue DONKEY’ in all contexts). The
overall difference scores of the Spanish are higher than those of the Dutch, because Spanish
tend to produce the elicited NPs with a list intonation that ends in a very high boundary tone,
whereas such boundary tones are less extreme in the Dutch data.
The L2 data show that although the Spanish learners of Dutch produce lower difference
scores in the NG context than in all other contexts (which means that they differentiate
between the information status types in a target-like way), it is their high boundary tones that
seem to inhibit them from producing native-like intonation patterns in Dutch. The data
produced by the Dutch learners of Spanish show the same tendency: the difference between
the NG context and the NN context is no longer significant, which suggests that, even though
their L1 is still influences their prosody, they are acquiring the intonation of their L2. In
conclusion, prosodic transfer from the L1 to the L2 takes place in both learning situations,
however, there are also subtle indications that the L2 learners start to acquire the patterns
characteristic of their L2.
As mentioned in the introduction, we were also interested in determining whether the
degree of transfer is influenced by the L2 proficiency of the speaker and whether transfer
from the L2 to the L1 is possible in this particular context. Unfortunately, the additional
analyses that we performed to answer these questions are outside the scope of this abstract.
For instance, when dividing the L2 learners into proficient and less proficient learners, our
results show that an increase in the language proficiency of the L2 learner clearly yields a
more native-like intonation in the L2 in both Spanish and Dutch. Furthermore, a comparison
between the native data and L1 data of the L2 learners showed that although there is some
variance in the data between the two groups, there is no statistically significant difference
between the intonation produced by L1 speakers and the L1 speech produced by L2 learners.
Thus, the claims on the existence of prosodic transfer from the L2 to the L1 made in earlier
work on peak timing by advanced Dutch learners of Greek by Mennen (2004) cannot be
corroborated for our learners of Dutch and Spanish.
Acknowledgements
We thank Gerdientje Oggel, Cristina Irún Chavarría, Johanna Sattler and María José Calvo González for their
help with the data collection, Constantijn Kaland for his guidance concerning Praat, and Monique Pollmann for
statistical advice. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier
version of this abstract.
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