The perception-production link in intonation: evidence from German learners of English

Investigations of the link between the perception and production of prosody by language learners can inform theories of prosody perception and production, especially with regard to Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and for the implementation of prosody in Foreign Language Teaching (FLT). The perception and production of prosody in L2 speech are often analyzed separately, but the link between the two is rarely the focus of investigation [e.g. 1, 2]. In a previous study [3], we analyzed the perception of prosody in read speech by German learners of English (n=20), who performed similarly to the British English (BrE) control group (n=25) for some sentence types (e.g. statements, yes/no-questions) and worse for others (e.g. open and closed tag questions, sarcasm). The present study extends this analysis by comparing the same learners' perception and production of prosody in read speech with the same sentence types. Overall, the learners (n=20) performed better in production and were more similar to the native speakers' (n=10) performance than in the perception task. However, the learners significantly differed from the native controls in production, i.e. closed tag questions and checking questions. Interestingly, the learners also performed significantly better in yes/no and statement questions than the native speakers.