Prosodic Transfer: An Acoustic Study of L2 English vs. L2 Japanese

The book presents an extended investigation of how first language (L1) prosodic characteristics affect second language (L2) prosodic patterns in the production of the adult L2 speaker: i.e., prosodic transfer. Two L2 types are examined experimentally: L2 English produced by L1 Japanese speakers, and L2 Japanese produced by L1 English speakers. This comparison is interesting, since Japanese and English are typologically very different in terms of their prosodic properties: e.g., English has stress accent, while Japanese has pitch accent; Japanese has a phonemic length contrast, while English does not; English is a stress-timed language, while Japanese is a mora-timed language. The results of a series of acoustic experiments show the complex effects of L1 on L2 speech development at multiple speech levels. The implications of the results presented in the book should be of interest to researchers in phonetics, phonology and L2 language acquisition as well as language teachers.