An initial investigation of L1 and L2 discourse speech planning in English

A perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework was used in this study to investigate similarities and differences in the size and strategy of discourse-level speech planning across L1 and L2 English speaker groups. While both groups appear to produce similar configurations of acoustic contrasts to signal discourse boundaries, L1 speakers were found to produce these cues more robustly in English. Differences were also found between L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin speaker groups with respect to the distribution of prosodic break levels and break locations. These differences in L1 and L2 organization of discourse speech prosody in English can be largely attributed to between-group differences in speech planning and chunking strategies whereby L2 speakers use more intermediate chunking units and fewer larger-scale planning units in their prosodic discourse organization. Through more understanding of prosody transfer, we believe that technology developed on the basis of L1 Mandarin spoken language processing may be applied to L2 English produced by the same speaker population, with little modification.