The acquisition of question intonation by Vietnamese learners of English

Abstract This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English intonation can be clearly derived from the observation of the data, and (3) whether the L2 English intonation patterns are transferred from Vietnamese. A data set of 25 sentences that included 5 statements and 20 information-seeking questions were constructed. Ten native Australian English speakers as a control group and 20 Southern Vietnamese speakers of English (10 beginners and 10 advanced speakers) were recorded. The final tunes (the direction of the final F0 contours) of the sentences were analysed. The result showed that while the advanced speakers of English mostly produced intonation patterns that are typically used by native English speakers, beginning speakers of English used a variety of tunes, several of which are deviate from the native-like standard and clearly transferred from the tone contours in Vietnamese. The findings of this study have an original and significant contribution to the literature because it investigated into the prosodic transfer of intonation patterns between two typologically distinct languages: English, a stress accent language and Vietnamese, a contrastive contour tone language and has implications for intonation teaching.