L1 and L2 respiratory patterns of Chinese and English bilinguals´ read speech

This paper investigated the respiratory patterns of native English and Chinese´s bilinguals in the read speech material of both languages. Experiments are conducted by respiratory belts, to measure breast breath signal, abdomen breath signal and the accumulated breath signal of the two. Results showed that speakers tend to adopt different breath patterns in L1 and L2 and tend to borrow their L1 respiratory pattern into their L2 processing strategy. Results also show that this borrowing seems to be positively correlated with their L2 oral proficiency. These findings have implications for respiratory signal processing, prosodic typology, bilingualism and second language acquisition.