Duration of Disyllabic Words Produced by Russian Learners of Chinese

The current study explores the performance of disyllabic words’ duration in Chinese produced by advanced L2 learners. Eight native speakers and eight Russian learners of Chinese were recruited. They participated in two read-aloud tasks. In one task, they read aloud disyllabic words at the sentence-medial position, and in the other, they read aloud disyllabic words at the sentence-final position. Each task included thirty sentences. The duration of disyllabic words produced by L2 learners was analyzed by ANOVA. The results indicated that L2 learners adequately produced the duration of disyllabic words at the sentence-final position. The extra lengthening occured on the second syllable within a disyllabic word at the sentence-medial position. Moreover, at the sentence-medial position, learners and native speakers had significant differences in duration of Tone 1 and Tone 2 of the first syllable. The findings suggest that multiple factors influence L2 syllable duration at various word/sentence positions, including the prosodic chunking ability of learners, L1 prosodic structure and physiological mechanism.