The Phonetics and Phonology of L2 Accentuation Patterns by Taiwanese Mandarin-Speaking Learners of Japanese

This study examines the L2 accentuation patterns of Taiwanese Mandarin (TM)-speaking Japanese learners. Factors such as word length, syllable weight, and familiarity were controlled in the production experiment. The principal findings were that accent and accent locus were not affected by the prosodic factors. In fact, unaccented tokens were disfavored to a great extent and, more importantly, an L2 accent was preferentially placed on the penultimate syllable, regardless of syllable weight. It is argued that these characteristics are attributable to trochaic feet in Mandarin. It is further argued that the preferred bimoraic pattern of TM syllables is responsible for the failure to acquire the contrast between heavy vs. light syllables in L2 Japanese. These results confirmed that the metrical properties of the L1 (tone language) transfer to the prosodic pattern of the L2 (pitch-accent language).