Quantity Convergence, Quality Divergence: Disentangling Fluency and Accuracy in L2 Mandarin Prosody
This research provides insights into the fossilization and stability of the L2 syntax-prosody interface for second language Mandarin learners, highlighting a trade-off between fluency and structural accuracy.
This study investigated L2 Mandarin prosody in Vietnamese learners, finding that while high-proficiency learners achieved native-like quantity of prosodic boundaries at the Major Phrase level, their structural mapping diverged significantly. Specifically, they demoted boundaries at the Subject-Verb interface and promoted them at the Verb-Object interface, leading to an inverted prosodic hierarchy.
While second language (L2) learners may acquire target syntactic word order, mapping this syntax onto appropriate prosodic structures remains a persistent challenge. This study investigates the fossilization and stability of the L2 syntax-prosody interface by comparing 67 native Mandarin speakers with 67 Vietnamese learners using the BLCU-SAIT corpus. By integrating C-ToBI boundary annotation with Dependency Grammar analysis, we examined both the quantity of prosodic boundaries and their mapping to syntactic relations. Results reveal a non-linear acquisition: although high-proficiency learners (VNH) converge to the native baseline in boundary quantity at the Major Phrase level (B3), their structural mapping significantly diverges. Specifically, VNH demote the prosodic boundary at the Subject-Verb (SBV) interface (Major Phrase B3 -> Prosodic Word B1), while erroneously promoting the boundary at the Verb-Object (VOB) interface (Prosodic Word B1 -> Major Phrase B3). This strategy allows learners to maintain high long phrasal output at the expense of structural accuracy. This results in a distorted prosodic hierarchy where the native pattern is inverted.