Book notice: Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones — Beyond First-Language Transfer

Abstract

Second Language Acquisition of Mandarin Chinese Tones – Beyond First-Language Transfer by Hang Zhang, as the title suggests, looks at how second-language (L2) learners, specifically non-tonal language speakers, i.e. English, Japanese and Korean speakers, learn Mandarin Chinese tones. This book offers novel contributions to the research of the L2 acquisition with the aim to figure out the factors of learners’ errors that are beyond learners’ first language (L1). The book is structured in seven chapters, which can be further divided into four main parts as follows: The first part (chapters 1 and 2) offers an introduction to the phonetics and phonology of Mandarin Chinese tones, prosodic structures of the three languages that are the native languages of L2 groups (English, Japanese and Korean) researched in this book, and a comprehensive overview of the previous research devoted to the L1 and L2 acquisition of Chinese tones. Chapter 1 also highlights the importance and difficulty of learning Chinese tones. Chapter 2 particularly focuses on three puzzles that previous research has not resolved with the explanation of L1 transfer, i.e. “(1) positional effects of contour tones (how T2 and T4 are constrained by anticipatory coarticulation), (2) the order of the acquisition of Mandarin tones (the difficulty of the acquisition of identical tone pairs compared to nonidentical tone pairs), and (3) the paradox of T3 (the acquisition of the notorious T3)” (p. 26). The second part (chapter 3) presents the methodology that was used to address the three puzzles discussed in the previous chapter. This part provides the information on test materials, participants, recording procedure, guidelines on assessing L2 tones and a very brief summary of the statistical analyses of the data used in the next part. The chapter emphasizes a detailed and logical description of how native Chinese speakers judge the correctness of a token produced by participants. In addition to correctness judgements, pitch values were also measured and evaluated as one of the assessment criteria. The third part, which is constituted by the book’s three core chapters 4–6, describes the research questions, hypotheses, research findings and discussions of the experiments corresponding to the three puzzles raised in the first part. Each of the three chapters focuses on one aspect, so the three chapters are basically independent of each other, but they are also closely linked to each other as they are supported by the same set of data. Chapter 4 investigates the role of anticipatory coarticulation in the production of T2 and T4 in disyllabic Chinese words by first introducing the nature of anticipatory tone coarticulation and then calculating the accuracy rates, maximum F0 and error types of these tones as produced by the three groups of learners. The results show that beyond L1 transfer, anticipatory dissimilation results in particular error patterns by L2 adult learners. Chapter 5 is organized in the same way as chapter 4. It concerns the difficulty of the acquisition of different tone pairs by conducting a constraint-based analysis using two independent phonological Received: March 15, 2019 Accepted: June 29, 2019 Published online: August 8, 2019