Tonal accents realization in Norwegian speakers' English production: Do Norwegians transfer their tonal accents?

Abstract

This study investigates whether Urban East Norwegian (hence force Norwegian) speakers realize their tonal accents on their English. One difference between these two languages is that Norwegian uses pitches to differentiate lexical items, whereas English uses pitch to indicate post-lexical contrast, i.e., to convey different pragmatic meaning. In Norwegian, both the L tone and H tone can be associated with the primary stressed syllable, resulting in different accents that can indicate different lexical items. This is to say that syllables with primary stress in Norwegian can have only two ways of accentuation, Accent 1 (L*H) and Accent 2 (H*LH). Tonality in Norwegian is independent of sentence intonation. In contrast, in English, tonality is affected by the sentence intonation. Therefore, in this thesis, based on these dissimilarities, a simple read-speech experiment was designed to explore whether Norwegian speakers transfer their tonal accents onto their English. The main findings of this study are: (1) all of the Norwegian participants were affected by their L1 Norwegian prosody; (2) the Accent 1, not the Accent 2, is the accent transferred; (3) most of the participants have problems with the tonal pattern of the test words when the words were placed at the utterance-initial and utterance-middle positions, but not for the utterance-final position; (4) there were individual differences among the participants, some of them were deeply affect by their Norwegian prosodic system, whilst others illustrate better control; (5) it seems that the carried-over tonal accent affected the participants' English intonation also. One additional finding of this study is that some of the participants did not fully acquire the English interrogatives' intonation.