Paragraph-Declination in Read Speech of Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), course: Hauptseminar Prosody, language: English, abstract: Declination in prosody refers to the fact that the pitch of the voice is most commonly on average lower at the end of a prosodic unit than it is at the beginning, especially in controlled (read) speech. The main concerns of this paper are the analysis and comparison of the paragraph- declination of read speech of native and non-native speakers of English. More precisely, the analysis and comparison of the paragraph-pitch-patterns in the English of a native speaker and of a speaker with the tone language Chinese as her native language. Do distinct differences between the pitch-curves (i.e. the curves of the F0-formants) exist, and, if so, what might be the reasons for those differences? Does the particular feature of the tone language Chinese, i.e. the word-meaning-defining pitch, in any way affect paragraph-declination in L2-English? Or does this feature have no effect on paragraph-declination at all, maybe for physiological reasons? For this purpose, two speech samples of read speech will be divided into paratones and the pitch-curves of the paratones of the intonation and tone language will then be measured and compared. But beforehand, a brief outline of the main differences between tone and intonation languages will be provided. A short definition of declination in prosody and two ways of defining prosodic domains follow.