Ineke Mennen

Second language acquisition of intonation: the case of peak alignment

This paper reports the results of an experimental study which examined the acquisition of Modern Greek [henceforth Greek] peak alignment in prenuclear rising accents by Dutch learners of Greek. Peak alignment data of a group of non-native (Dutch) speakers of Greek (obtained from two sets of recorded sentences; one in the L2 and one in the L1), were compared to those of native speakers of Dutch and native speakers of Greek.

It was found that:

(1) most of the Dutch bilinguals of Greek did not reach the target peak alignment values of the L2, even though they had been exposed to Greek for a long time;

(2) Dutch learners of Greek produced alignment values which were typically observed in Dutch monolinguals when the accented vowel is long. This suggests that they did not develop a 'merged system', but transferred one of the Dutch alignment categories to the L2.

(3) Although most Dutch bilinguals did not learn to produce the alignment values of the L2, the alignment pattern in their L1 was nevertheless affected. It seems that the difference between the two L1 alignment patterns is getting smaller, with the two patterns moving towards each other.

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