Umeå University, Department of Philosophy and Linguistics
PHONUM 9 (2003), 165-168
Available online at http://www.ling.umu.se/fonetik2003/
Tone choice in the English intonation of proficient
non-native speakers
Juhani Toivanen
MediaTeam, University of Oulu
An experiment is reported in which twelve Finnish test subjects, first-year
university students of English, acted a pre-written conversational dialogue
representing colloquial English. To obtain baseline data, twelve native
speakers of English were recruited to act the same dialogue. The speech data
was investigated acoustically in terms of f0. Most of the Finnish test subjects
could make, both phonetically and phonologically, a distinction between
falling and rising intonation but most of the speakers were hesitant about
associating rising tones with informational and/or pragmatic “openness”.
Thus, in the Finnish data, “reserved” or “incomplete” statements rarely
combined with rising or falling-rising intonation. It is argued that pragmatic,
rather than purely phonetic, interference was evident in the English
intonation of the Finnish speakers.
1. Introduction
In the literature on second language acquisition (SLA), the role of intonation has rarely been
discussed. Such recent handbooks on SLA as Ellis (1994) and Lightbown & Spada (1999),
for example, contain hardly any references to intonation, or prosody in general. The lack of
interest shown in prosodic aspects of interlanguage does seem to do a disservice to the
discipline of SLA research as intonation is undeniably an important aspect of especially the
pragmatic aspects of interlanguage speech. The relevance of the study of the general
pragmatic aspects of learner language is, of course, readily acknowledged in the literature
(Ellis, 1994).
In this paper, research on the intonation of the English spoken by Finns is reported. The
research is motivated by at least two factors. Firstly, there is no continuing tradition of the
study of the prosody of Finnish English speech – in contrast to segmental aspects, which
have been investigated much more thoroughly. Secondly, the features typical of Finnish
English intonation have been attributed almost solely to the effect of negative transfer or
interference. Thus, Hirvonen (1967) categorically concludes that “the English rising
intonation causes great learning problems for Finnish students of English”. Hirvonen’s claim
is based on the common assumption that, as there are no rising intonation contours in
standard spoken Finnish, rising tones in a second language will automatically be a problem
for the Finn. One of the aims of the present study is to assess the all-important role of
phonetic interference suggested by Hirvonen.
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2. Material
The speech data was obtained using a pre-written conversational dialogue representing
colloquial English (see Toivanen, 2001). The data was collected as a pilot experiment to a
more comprehensive study of interlanguage intonation reported in full detail in Toivanen
(2001). Twelve Finnish university students of English acted the conversational dialogue in
pairs. To collect baseline data, twelve native speakers of British English, university students
of history and literature, were recruited to act the same dialogue, with the same procedure.
The test subjects were allowed to study the dialogue for about 15 minutes before the taperecording, and the speakers were allowed to retake any part of the dialogue if they were not
satisfied with the first rendition. The speakers were advised to produce their speech as
naturally as possible simulating natural conversational English. The speech material for each
pair was tape-recorded with a high-quality microphone and a DAT recorder in an unechoic
studio, and transferred onto hard disk (44.1 kHz, 16 bit).
3. Analysis
The speech data was analyzed acoustically in terms of speaking fundamental frequency (f0);
the CSL speech analysis system was used. Together with the acoustic analysis, auditory
analysis was used to locate the nuclear f0 movement in each tone unit. The analysis was thus
basically carried out in accordance with the principles of the traditional “British school” of
intonation analysis. The tone unit was assumed to have a fairly clearly-defined internal
structure, containing, in addition to the tonic/nuclear syllable, a pre-head, a head and a tail.
The tonic syllables were determined using e.g. the following phonetic criteria: pitch peak,
maximum pitch range, kinetic tone, and loudness peak. Tone unit boundaries were
determined using phonetic and syntactic criteria: in most cases, silent pauses of at least 300
ms in duration could be perceived to separate tone units. Additional cues were anacrusis after
the initial tone unit boundary and final syllable lengthening after the nucleus. Even without
these cues, the tone unit boundaries could usually be found rather easily as the onset and the
nuclear syllable were prosodically salient: the tone unit boundaries could thus be assumed to
be somewhere within proclitic and enclitic segments (even if there was some uncertainty as
to the exact location). It should be pointed out that, in the data, a sentence boundary was also
a tone unit boundary (however, one sentence could contain two or more tone units in
speech).
The nuclear and post-nuclear pitch patterns were analyzed acoustically. The absolute Hz
values were expressed on the logarithmic semitone scale: f0 movements wider than 3 ST
were analyzed as dynamic (“kinetic”) tones, and narrower f0 movements were analyzed as
level tones. In the analysis of the data, the following tones were possible: fall, rise-fall, rise,
fall-rise, fall-plus-rise, and level tone.
4. Results
Averaging over all the tone units in the data, one tendency was clear: falling tones dominated
in both varieties of English. In the speech material produced by the Finns, 77.1 % of the tone
units contained a falling tone (a “simple” fall or a “complex” rise-fall); in the British data,
the percentage was 66.1 %. Level contours were clearly more common in the Finnish
English data (8.8 %) than in the British data (1.7 %). On the other hand, the rising tones
Tone choice in the English intonation of proficient non-native speakers
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(“simple” rises, “complex” fall-rises, and “compound” fall-plus-rises) were equally clearly
more common in the speech data produced by the native speakers (32.2 %) than in the nonnative data (14.1 %). In Table 1, the percentages are shown for each tone type recognized in
the analysis.
Table 1. Distribution of tone types in the data.
Britons
Finns
Fall
58.9 %
72 %
Rise-fall
7.2 %
5.1 %
Rise
14.3 %
9.3 %
Fall-rise
11 %
2.6 %
Fall-plus-rise
6.9 %
2.2 %
Level
1.7 %
8.8 %
The Mann-Whitney test was used to investigate the significance of the differences. The
differences concerning the frequency of the simple fall, the fall-rise, and the fall-plus-rise
were highly significant (p < 0.001). The difference in the distribution of the level tone was
significant (p < 0.01), and the difference in the case of the simple rise was almost significant
(p < 0.05).
5. Syntactic analysis and discussion
That falling intonation was so predominant in the data is not surprising. In the literature, it
has been reported that 50-65 % of tones will be falls – almost in any type of discourse in
spoken (British) English (Crystal, 1975). The fact that the Finns used falling tones most of
the time (and clearly more often than the native speakers) is also a most expected result. As
at least standard Finnish intonation is almost exclusively characterized by falling tones,
mother tongue influence was a factor shaping tone choice in the Finns’ English. However,
the general distribution of tones does not necessarily reveal important differences in the
relationship between intonation and syntax between the two sets of speech data. For the
purposes of an analysis of the relationship between tone types and syntax, the material was
divided into major sentence-types. The sentence-types were the following: statements, yesno questions (polar questions), statement-questions (declarative questions) and wh-questions.
The wh-questions will not be discussed any further since they systematically ended on falling
tones in both sets of speech data.
Interestingly, in the yes-no questions produced by the native speakers, falling intonation
turned out to be more common that rising intonation (53 % vs. 47 %). In the Finnish English
data, the falling tones were predominant in yes-no questions (65.3 % falls, 24 % rises).
Although it has been argued that a rising tone is the unmarked, polite way of intoning polar
questions, there is empirical evidence that in most speech situations, even the majority of
such questions may actually end on falling tones (Crystal, 1975). The results of this smallscale study do seem to support the view that there may be no systematic relationship between
yes-no questions and rising tones.
As for the statement-questions in the data, most of the tone units contained a rising tone
(74 % in the British data and 57.2 % in the Finnish English data). The acoustic analysis
indicated that in questions of this type, the final pitch systematically reached the speakerspecific high pitch range (see Toivanen, 2001, for a detailed description of the analysis).
Thus, both the native and non-native speakers used the “high-rise” to turn a declarative into a
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question. This finding is in strong contrast with some earlier studies of the English intonation
of Finns (see section 1).
Perhaps the most significant result, however, was that the native speakers used rising
tones relatively often with statements (29 %) – which was rare in the non-native speech data
(6.5 %). The falling-rising tone was particularly common in the English of the native
speakers. As suggested in the literature on the “semantics” of intonation, this tone was
clearly associated with utterances conveying “open” meanings of different kinds, e.g.
“uncertainty” or “reservation”. In such contexts, the Finns, by contrast, mainly used the
falling tones.
From the viewpoint of interlanguage intonation, the interesting point is that most of the
Finns failed to signal the pragmatic element of “continuation” or “reservation” with
intonation. The Finns indiscriminately used falling tones with statements, regardless of the
communicative/pragmatic function of the utterance. The most important difference in tone
choice between the two groups of speakers seems to concern the use of the fall-rise. The fallrise has a specific communicative function in (British) English intonation, and may greatly
influence the pragmatic meaning of the utterance. Even generally proficient Finnish speakers
of English may be largely unaware of the contribution of the falling-rising tone to the
meaning of an utterance. However, it should be emphasized that, phonetically, the fall-rise is
not difficult to produce; thus pragmatic, rather than phonetic, interference is the key issue.
Furthermore, it should be emphasized that most of the Finnish speakers uttered statementquestions with high rising intonation – an intonation contour entirely different from any pitch
pattern in Finnish.
6. Conclusion
The results of this study seem to question some of the old myths about the English intonation
of Finns. The traditional explanation centering around the model of phonetic interference
needs to be revised: while Finnish speakers of English can produce (high) rising intonation, a
more interesting question is what syntactic or pragmatic structures require such tones. The
pragmatic meaning of an utterance decides the choice between a fall and a rise/fall-rise, and
this may still be a problem even for proficient Finnish speakers of English. Thus, in the
future research on (Finnish English) interlanguage intonation, the focus should be on
communicative and pragmatic aspects.
7. References
Crystal, D. (1975) The English Tone of Voice. London: Edward Arnold.
Ellis, R. (1994) The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hirvonen, P. (1967) On the Problems Met by Finnish Students in Learning the Rising
Interrogative Intonation in English. Publications of the Department of Phonetics, 2.
University of Turku.
Lightbown, P. & Spada, N. (1999) How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Toivanen, J. (2001) Perspectives on Intonation: English, Finnish and English Spoken by
Finns. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.