Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation by Chinese speakers: Effects of linguistic experience and prosodic features

127 Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation by Chinese speakers: Effects of linguistic experience and prosodic features Peizhu shang Beijing Institute of Technology PaoLo roseano Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia & University of South Africa wendy eLVira-garcía Universitat de Barcelona Received: 2023-01-04 / Accepted: 2024-03-12 DOI: https://doi.org/10.30827/portalin.vi42.27042 ISSN paper edition: 1697-7467, ISSN digital edition: 2695-8244 ABSTRACT: Prior research suggests that Chinese speakers, due to their extensive experience with a tonal language, have an enhanced ability to discern pitch contrasts. This study investigates whether this aptitude extends to perceiving intonation in second language (L2) Spanish, and how it interacts with intonation and stress patterns. 43 native Spanish speakers and 75 Chinese learners of Spanish participated in a forced-choice perceptual test. Participants were asked to identify the sentence type of stimuli, which were created using the gating method. The results revealed that native speakers consistently outperformed Chinese learners in mapping diverse pitch contours into intonation categories, notably those absent in the L2 prosodic system. However, Chinese learners exhibited significant improvements in intonation perception after hearing the initial F0 peak and the F0 downslope of the nuclear syllable, suggesting a positive transfer of pitch discrimination skills developed in their native speech. Additionally, the position of the final stressed syllable was found to influence intonation identification, with its effect varying depending on utterance length. These findings highlight the complex interplay of cross-linguistic intonation perception and emphasize the importance of linguistic background and prosodic context in assessing the perceptual performance of L2 listeners. Keywords: intonation contours, cross-linguistic perception, Chinese learners of Spanish, linguistic experience, stress pattern Percepción interlingüística de la entonación del español por sinohablantes: Efectos de la experiencia lingüística y los rasgos prosódicos RESUMEN: Investigaciones previas sugieren que los sinohablantes, debido a su amplia experiencia con una lengua tonal, tengan una mejor capacidad para discernir contrastes tonales. Este estudio investiga si esta aptitud se extiende a la percepción entonativa en el español como segunda lengua (L2) y cómo interactúa con patrones entonativos y acentuales. 43 hablantes nativos de español y 75 aprendices chinos de español participaron en un test perceptivo de elección forzada. Se pidió a los participantes que identificaran el tipo oracional de los Porta Linguarum, Issue 42, June 2024 127-145 128 Porta Linguarum Issue 42, June 2024 estímulos, los cuales fueron creados usando el método de gating. Los resultados revelaron que los hablantes nativos superaron consistentemente a los aprendices chinos en la categorización de contornos entonativos, especialmente aquellos ausentes en el sistema prosódico de la L2. Sin embargo, los aprendices chinos mostraron mejoras significativas en la percepción entonativa después de escuchar el pico inicial y la bajada de F0 de la sílaba nuclear, sugiriendo una transferencia positiva de habilidades discriminativas tonales desarrolladas en su habla nativa. Además, se encontró que la posición de la última sílaba acentuada influye en la identificación entonativa, variando su efecto dependiendo de la longitud oracional. Estos hallazgos resaltan la compleja interacción de la percepción de la entonación interlingüística y enfatizan la importancia de los antecedentes lingüísticos y el contexto prosódico en la evaluación del rendimiento perceptivo de los oyentes de L2.. Palabras claves: contornos entonativos, percepción interlingüística, aprendices chinos de español, experiencia lingüística, patrón acentual 1. IntroductIon In Peninsular Spanish, statements and yes/no questions can be ambiguous from a morphosyntactic point of view, therefore intonation is often used linguistically to help listeners distinguish sentence types (Face, 2007; Shang et al., 2021). Similar to other intonational languages such as English, Spanish intonation is realized by rising-falling pitch movements over utterances. Thus, changing the pitch pattern of an utterance can change the statement into question (Kapatsinski et al., 2017). In contrast, in tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, the higher-level sentence intonation is expressed mainly by expanding or compressing the pitch range, because the surface fundamental frequency (F0) contour is primarily used to encode word-level lexical tone (Shang & Elvira-García, 2022; Wang et al., 2013; Yuan, 2011). These cross-linguistic differences in the prosodic system would influence the way first language (L1) speakers of a tonal language produce and perceive the intonation of a non-native intonational language. In recent decades, within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework, there has been a significant advancement in instrumental descriptions of the intonation of second languages (L2). This development encompasses not only the production but also the perception of phonological elements and phonetic properties. However, research focusing on the perception of L2 intonation in the context of language contact between tonal and non-tonal languages has predominantly concentrated on Chinese learners of English (e.g., Grabe et al., 2003; Liu & Rodriguez, 2012; Ortega-Llebaria et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2010). Conversely, empirical studies addressing the perception of Spanish intonation by Chinese learners, both from Taiwan and mainland China, remain limited, with notable contributions from Cortés Moreno (1997, 2001), Li (2020), Liu (2005), and Shang et al. (2022, 2024). The initial studies by Cortés Moreno focused on the challenges faced by L2 Taiwanese learners in identifying different sentence types in Spanish, such as declarative, interrogative, and exclamative forms. Subsequent research by Li and Shang et al. focused, respectively, on the perception of focal contrasts and the auditory processing of acoustic cues in Spanish statements and questions. Despite the variations in experimental methodologies and research aims, a consistent finding across these studies showed that Chinese L2 learners deviated from native Spanish speakers in perceiving target intonational events because their prior history of linguistic experience was different. In addition to the influence of linguistic background, other prosodic factors such as 129 Peizhu Shang, Paolo RoSeano et al. Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation... the stress pattern of the utterance-final word may affect listeners’ perceptual evaluation of target intonation categories (Garrido Almiñana, 2008; Shang et al., 2022, 2024). However, it is not yet clear whether the effect of stress is evident in a cross-linguistic listening environment. Therefore, the present paper aims to investigate the non-native perception of Spanish intonation patterns by L1 and Chinese L2 speakers of Spanish. Specifically, we are interested in examining how Chinese L2 learners from a native tonal language rely on different intonational cues to perceive question-statement contrasts in Spanish, and how their perceptual accuracy is influenced by their linguistic experience and the position of the last stressed syllable compared to Spanish L1 listeners. 1.1. Intonation perception in L1 and L2 Spanish In Peninsular Spanish, statements and yes/no questions can differ in four intonational aspects: initial F0 peak, pitch movement in the medial position, pitch contour of the final stressed syllable, and the final boundary tone (Face, 2004). Specifically, statements typically present an F0 contour that rises from the onset of the stressed syllable and has its peak in the poststressed syllable. And after the last prenuclear syllable, the contour undergoes a progressive down-stepping till the end (Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Hualde & Prieto, 2015). Yes/no questions are also known to have a rising pitch accent in the prenuclear position, but their initial F0 peak is higher and the rising movement starts at the offset of the accented syllable (Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Face, 2007, 2008). After that, the F0 pattern begins to fall gradually until the final nuclear syllable and then shows a sharp rise at the end of the sentence. In addition to prior contrasts, Face (2004, 2005, 2007) noted other two subtler intonational variances between these sentence types: (a) an F0 rise in the medial position of statements, absent in yes/no questions – noticeable only in utterances with at least three stressed words, and (b) a slight rise in the final stressed syllable of statements as opposed to an F0 dip in yes/no questions. Based on the differences described in Spanish statements and questions, Face (2005) employed a gating paradigm to investigate how different intonation patterns influence sentence type perception. His experimental results showed that Spanish L1 listeners were able to correctly perceive 95% of the sentence type after hearing the initial F0 peak, and this accuracy rate continued to increase after presenting the gate that contained the medial F0 pattern. Later, to compare the weight of each intonational cue, Face (2007) manipulated the height of several pitch points so that the intonational features presented in the utterance were in conflict. Results of this experiment showed that the final pitch movement was the strongest cue for distinguishing statements and questions, despite the heavy influence that the first peak and the median F0 pattern had on listeners’ perceptual decisions. Contrary to the sentence type perception in L1 Spanish, the non-native perception of Spanish intonation has been less extensively studied. Trimble (2013) examined the cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation using a gating paradigm and found a heavy reliance on the final pitch movement for sentence type identification. Specifically, 58% of English L2 speakers failed to distinguish Spanish statements from yes/no questions without the final rise/fall. However, a similar study with Chinese learners of Spanish (Li, 2020) showed higher perceptual accuracy (68.33%) based solely on the first F0 peak. The superior per- 130 Porta Linguarum Issue 42, June 2024 formance of Chinese speakers seems to support the notion that long-term experience with a tonal language may aid in listeners assimilating non-native tonal contrasts (Meng et al., 2020; Ortega-Llebaria et al., 2017). But despite this tonal advantage, Chinese L2 learners still lagged behind native Spanish speakers in utilizing the prenuclear peak for sentence differentiation (Li, 2020). Furthermore, studies by Li (2020), Trimble (2013), and Zarate-Sandez et al. (2015) indicated that both Chinese and English learners of Spanish could achieve comparable accuracy to native speakers upon hearing the final pitch movement. This aligns with Gussenhoven and Chen’s (2000) findings, where speakers of diverse languages (Chinese, Dutch, Hungarian) effectively used higher final pitch and later F0 peaks as cues for question perception in unfamiliar languages. A generally accepted explanation for this phenomenon is that such intonational forms, particularly the final rise/fall, can be universal in the relationship with the paralinguistic meanings and derived from some biologically determined codes (Gussenhoven, 2004). For instance, the Frequency Code posits that an increased F0 value expresses the speaker’s uncertainty and hence is an interrogative marker, whilst a lower F0 signals assertiveness and therefore is associated with declarative encoding (Gussenhoven, 2004; Ohala, 1984). 1.2. The role of linguistic experience and prosodic features in intonation perception Despite differences on deeper issues, speech perception theories show a strong agreement on the critical role of linguistic experience on cross-linguistic perception. The Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) and its extension to L2 learning (PAM-L2) posit that the perception of L2 segments can be implicitly or explicitly constrained by L1 phonological categories and phonetic properties (Best & Strange, 1992; Best & Tyler, 2007). Likewise, the PAM framework developed for suprasegmentals (PAM-S) suggests that the auditory performance of L2 listeners reflects the specific properties of their L1 phonological and phonetic systems (Alexander & Wang, 2016; So & Best, 2010). Such theoretical claims have been supported by studies from the prosodic and neurophysiological points of view. For instance, it has been reported that Chinese listeners’ perception of the native or non-native tone (Chang et al., 2017), intonation (Ortega-Llebaria et al., 2017) and stress (Meng et al., 2020) is enhanced by their native tonal language experience. Particularly, Ortega-Llebaria et al. (2017) examined the perception of English words using the prime-target pairs and found that Chinese learners detected faster the F0 mismatches than English listeners, suggesting that the longterm experience with a tonal language can shape the way how listeners perceive the tonal contrasts inherent to a given language. The effect of tonal language enhancement on pitch perception has been found in a vast majority of studies, including the perception of local tonal events of second or third languages. For instance, Wiener and Goss (2018) investigated the perception of Japanese pitch accents by English speakers using an ABX discrimination task and found that the English group apparently improved their accuracy after taking a 15-week L2 Mandarin tone course. On the other hand, acoustic analyses of Spanish intonation showed that the stress pattern in the utterance-final position may also modulate the evolution of the final pitch movement depending on the type of melodic patterns (Fant, 1984; Garrido Almiñana, 2008; 131 Peizhu Shang, Paolo RoSeano et al. Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation... Navarro-Tomás, 1974; Shang, 2022a). The rising-falling intonation contours were reported to be the most dependent on the location of the final stressed syllable of an utterance, while the shape of falling patterns did not seem to be dependent at all (Garrido Almiñana, 2008). Despite the potential influence of stress on the production of intonation contours, it remains unclear whether the position of the last stressed syllable affects the recognition of statements and questions by L1 and L2 listeners. Recent cue-weighting studies on Spanish intonation observed that words with stress on the final syllable were difficult to perceive by Mandarin L2 learners in terms of intonation perception, due to the conflict of functions in f0 encodings in utterance-final positions (Shang et al., 2022, 2024). However, these studies focused on listeners’ sensitivity to changes in acoustic cues (F0, duration, and intensity), whether and how the stress pattern in the utterance-final position might affect cross-linguistic perception of categorical elements of Spanish intonation remain to be explored. 1.3. The present study Considering the discussions outlined above, it is evident that the cross-linguistic perception of intonation is subject to a variety of influencing factors. Therefore, the primary aim of this study is twofold: (a) to explore the impact of these factors on the perception of Spanish intonation, and (b) to delineate the perceptual challenges faced by Chinese L2 learners in contrast with native Spanish speakers. To achieve these objectives, we conducted a gating experiment focusing on the categorical perception of intonational patterns and contrastive structures in Spanish statements and yes/no questions. Our examination specifically revolves around three dimensions: (1) the shape of intonation contours; (2) the influence of being a native speaker of a tone language; and (3) the position of the final stressed syllable. This research is driven by three core questions regarding the cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation, particularly pertaining to the Chinese-Spanish language pairing, which have not been thoroughly addressed in prior studies: RQ1: How do Chinese L2 learners compare to native Spanish speakers in their perception of varying intonational contours in statements and yes/no questions? RQ2: In what ways does linguistic background shape the categorical perception of Spanish intonation? Specifically, does extensive experience with a tonal language enhance L2 learners’ ability to perceive non-native sentence types? RQ3: Does the stress pattern in the final position of an utterance influence the cross-linguistic perception of Spanish sentence types? 2. MethodologY 2.1. Materials and recordings We used four pairs of broad focus statements and yes/no questions to generate the stimuli (see Table 1). The statement and the yes/no question of each pair were morphosyntactically identical. The four sentence matches differed in their length and therefore in their number of stressed words. For each length, we included two stress patterns for the utterance-final 132 Porta Linguarum Issue 42, June 2024 word: penultimate stressed syllable (paroxytone) and final stressed syllable (oxytone). The DCT (Discourse Completion Task) technique was used to elicit a natural production of the statements and the yes/no questions (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010). A female native speaker of Spain (age at recording: 31) was asked to give her response at a normal speaking rate after presenting each situational context. The recordings took place in a quiet room using the microphone Rode Smartlav+ connected to the interface of Scarlett. Audio files were digitized at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and with a quantization precision of 16 bits. Table 1. Categorization of the recorded utterances sentence tyPe n. oF stress FinaL stressed word stimuLus Statement 1 Oxytone Alcalá. Statement 1 Paroxytone Sevilla. Statement 2 Oxytone Viene a Alcalá. Statement 2 Paroxytone Viene a Sevilla. Yes/no question 1 Oxytone ¿Alcalá? Yes/no question 1 Paroxytone ¿Sevilla? Yes/no question 2 Oxytone ¿Viene a Alcalá? Yes/no question 2 Paroxytone ¿Viene a Sevilla? 2.2. Stimulus creation The recordings described above were used to create the stimuli. In order to do so, a gating method was employed based on the rules proposed by Face (2005, 2007). Each of the four sentences with two stressed words was split into four gates. Contrary to what is usually done, we did not use segmental information to create the steps, instead, we used intonational events which contain the three intonational differences between the statement and the yes/no question. As a result, gates coincided with known intonational events in Spanish phonology and therefore recordings with one and two stressed words had a different number of steps. For sentences with two stressed words, Gate 1 consisted of the F0 contour during the first stressed syllable “Vie” where the statement showed a slight rise starting near the onset of the stressed syllable while the yes/no question no (see Figure 1). Gate 2 included the initial F0 peak, and it may sometimes contain an adjacent syllable of the following word because of the synaloepha. This peak of the second gate was reported to be the first strong differential cue in identifying the two-word sentences, given that questions have a different prenuclear pattern than statements in Spanish (Face, 2007, 2011). That is also the case in our study, for example, in Figure 1, the yes/no question has a 71 Hz higher F0 peak (335 Hz) than the statement (264 Hz). Gate 3 begins after the first peak and before the utterance-final syllable. Hence, for sentences ending with a paroxytone word, gate 3 included the F0 contour of the final stressed syllable, which unequivocally differentiates the yes/no question (rising contour) from the statement (low-falling contour). In the case of utterances ending with an oxytone word, gate 3 did not contain a stressed syllable. This 133 Peizhu Shang, Paolo RoSeano et al. Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation... means that gate 3 has more cues for the correct recognition in final paroxytone sentences than in oxytone ones. We decided to keep this division in order to create the same number of gates for the two stress patterns. This difference in gate 3 also allows us to explore the role of the final stressed syllable in perceiving question-statement contrasts. The last gate (gate 4) of the two-word sentences consisted of the intonation patterns of the final syllable which traditionally have been referred to as the last but most typical cue for signalling the statement and the yes/no question. Regarding the sentences with one stressed word, we created two gates. The boundary of the gates was established just before the utterance-final syllable (see Figure 2). Similar to the longer sentences, the gating division of the two stress patterns in the one-word sentences was slightly different. The paroxytone word differed from the oxytone word in including the F0 contour of the stressed syllable in gate 1 (which was a relatively high-rising contour in statements whereas a low-falling contour in yes/no questions). The last gate (gate 2) was comprised of the F0 contours of the whole word, including the typical final pitch movement of statements and questions. In both cases, the division of each gate for the eight sentences was realized using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2020) without modifying any acoustic signal. The final stimuli were generated by successively accumulating the first gate, the first and the second gate, and so on until involving the entire utterance. In sum, a total of 24 stimuli were created for the gating experiment. Each stimulus was separated and saved as a new sound file, with 500 milliseconds of silence before and after the speech. Figure 1. Intonation contours of the sentence pair with two stressed words aligned with the syllables and the gates (S1, gate 1 of the statement, Q1, gate 1 of the yes/no question, and so on for the rest of the abbreviations) 134 Porta Linguarum Issue 42, June 2024 Figure 2. Intonation contours of the one-word statement and yes/no question aligned with the syllables and the gates 2.3. Procedure The data was gathered using the online survey software Alchemer. The survey consisted of two sections. The first aimed to collect information on the socio-demographic and linguistic background of the participants. The second contained the stimuli of the gating experiment. The survey was distributed separately in Chinese and Spanish via e-mail and social media platforms. Participants were required to listen to the stimuli using the earphones in a quiet place and they were instructed to listen to every audio once. Prior to the formal task, participants performed a practice trial to get familiar with the procedure. Additionally, given the difficulty that a gating test can be, the text of the entire utterance was displayed without punctuation marks. The task of the gating test was identifying whether the stimulus they heard was “Statement” or “Yes/no question” by clicking a button on the screen. To avoid listeners’ response bias, the perceptual choices and speech stimuli were set in random order. 2.4. Participants Data cleaning was performed before analysis. Data from two Spanish listeners were excluded because their age was over 60. Similarly, Chinese speakers who self-declared to have learned Spanish before the age of 16 were removed from this study to minimize the effect of age of acquisition. Thus, there were forty-three Spanish L1 listeners and seventy-five Chinese L2 learners of Spanish in the present study. Of the Chinese subjects, 22 had a B1 level in Spanish, 27 had a B2 level in Spanish, and 26 had a C1 level in Spanish. The ages of all participants ranged from 18 to 59 years with a mean age of 28.77 (SD = 8.35). Among them, 28 were male and 90 were female. None of the individuals reported any history of hearing or communication problems at the time of testing. 135 Peizhu Shang, Paolo RoSeano et al. Cross-linguistic perception of Spanish intonation... 2.5. Statistical analysis To examine the research questions proposed in this study, a binary logistic regression was carried out using the glm function in the base R package (R Core Team, 2020). The binary outcome variable “perceptual accuracy” was created based on listeners’ responses to each stimulus. The true and false answers were coded as 1 and 0, respectively. Listener group (Chinese vs. Spanish), sentence type of the stimuli (statement vs. yes/no question), and stress pattern (paroxytone vs. oxytone) were treated as binary variables, while gate (1 < 2 < 3 < 4 for two-word sentences; 1 < 2 for one-word sentences) were read as discrete ordinal variables. For the continuous predictors of stimulus order, a z-transformation was performed based on the mean and standard deviation before entering the model. To find the best-performing model, a stepwise backward elimination was carried out using the stepAIC function from the MASS package to iteratively exclude the least contributive predictors (Venables & Ripley, 2002). When the factors failed to achieve the .05 level of significance, they were removed from the model until all effects were statistically significant for the prediction. For further interaction analysis, emmeans objects were created using the contrast function to estimate the contrast of interests (Lenth et al., 2018). 3. results 3.1. Results of the sentences with two stressed words Since the effects of stress type and stimulus order were statistically irrelevant, they were not included in the final model. The results of the likelihood ratio test revealed a highly significant effect between the perceptual accuracy and the variables of listener group, sentence type and gate [χ²(13) = 527.66, p < .0001]. In general, Table 3 indicates that listeners were more accurate in perceiving statements than yes/no questions. However, the effect of sentence type was not distributed evenly across the four gates. The significant interaction between sentence type and gate [χ²(3) = 35.09, p < .0001], as shown in Table 2, demonstrated that the accuracy of perceiving statements was significantly higher than yes/no questions only in gate 1. More precisely, by transforming the regression coefficient in Table 2 into odds ratios (OR), we found that statements were 3.69 times more likely to be correctly perceived than yes/no questions in the first gate [OR = exp(1.3053) = 3.69, p < .0001]. 142 Porta Linguarum Issue 42, June 2024 their effectiveness in enhancing Spanish intonation acquisition among Chinese learners but also contribute to the broader field of L2 speech acquisition. Ultimately, the goal is to draw greater attention to the often-neglected aspect of intonation in language teaching and learning, particularly in the Chinese-Spanish linguistic context. By doing so, educators and learners can gain a deeper appreciation of this linguistic phenomenon, leading to more comprehensive and effective language education. FUNDING & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study received funding from the Beijing Institute of Technology Research Fund Program for Young Scholars (No. 3240012222308) and the Ministry of Education University-Industry Collaborative Education Program of China (No. 230824085307241), awarded to the first author (P.S.). Peizhu Shang of the Beijing Institute of Technology is the corresponding author for this paper. We extend our sincere gratitude to the participants of this study, the anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their invaluable contributions and insights. 6. references Alexander, J., & Wang, D. Y. (2016). 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