Are you asking me or telling me: A Study of L2 Speakers' Perception of Two Emotional and Pragmatic Cues in Intonationally Complex Sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese, like other tonal languages, makes use of modulation in F0 for both marking lexical items and pragmatic purposes. This makes it challenging for L2 speakers to acquire an accurate perception of prosody and identify emotional and pragmatic intents. This thesis presents a study on how L2 Mandarin speakers perceive two emotional and pragmatic cues, namely emphaticness and confidence, in intonationally complex sentences in Mandarin. Results show that compared to L2 speakers, monolingual English speakers consistently rated emphatic sentences as less emphatic, which suggests that L2 speakers were able to acquire at least some intonational knowledge of emphatic sentences in Mandarin. On the other hand, when compared to L2 speakers, native Mandarin speakers consistently rated questions as sounding less confident than L2 speakers did. This suggests that the prosody of questions in Mandarin is a challenging component to acquire. Further research on prosody in Mandarin and cross-linguistic comparisons between prosodies of different languages is needed to further address L2 Mandarin learners' difficulty in acquiring pragmatic prosody in the language.