Speech rhythm of the Danish-Chinese interlanguage relies on rhyme structure

Abstract

Although speech rhythm is a highly important factor in the

evaluation of nativeness, it is usually not explicitly taught in

second language acquisition. Moreover, acquisition studies

of Mandarin prosody typically focus on the acquisition of tone. We investigated durational patterns of Mandarin Chinese as produced by Danish learners. Native Mandarin Chinese rhythm is characterized by, first, sentence-final syllable lengthening, then tone-intrinsic duration, and finally, rhyme structure. Danish speech rhythm is fundamentally different, since Danish is a stress language with only primary stress on the level of the phonological phrase, and extensive reduction of unstressed syllables. We show that the interlanguage of Danish learners of Chinese is comparable to native Mandarin Chinese duration patterns with regard to rhyme structure. However, differentiation of duration based on tone and final lengthening lags behind in Danish acquisition of Chinese.