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July 27

Speaker of tonal language learning language 'without' tones

Do speakers of tonal language like Chinese have difficulties ignoring the tones of syllables when learning English (or whatever)? --Doroletho (talk) 13:47, 27 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, many L1 speakers of tonal languages will speak non-tonal l2s with an accent that has an odd prosody that essentially adds tone to the language they speak. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 00:09, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I was wondering actually if they have problems understanding words, since these could have different tones (which don't mean a thing) depending on the context. --Doroletho (talk) 01:40, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Learning to understand words in any foreign language is always hindered by new phonological contrasts in the L2. For example often speakers of tone languages here stress as tone and vice versa.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:19, 28 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

But the OP is asking about a new lack of contrast. It's an interesting question! It's not hard for an Anglophone to learn that (say) Italian does not distinguish certain pairs of vowels that are contrastive in English; most of the time we can simply say that half of the vowels we use do not occur in Italian. But pitch contours are significant in "non-tonal" languages, it's just that they're not lexically significant. Off hand I can't think of an analogous feature, i.e., a feature that is lexically contrastive in English and significant in some other way in some other language. —Tamfang (talk) 06:39, 29 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]