Information status and L2 prosody: A study of reference maintenance in Chinese learners of Dutch

When referring, speakers vary prosody according to the information status of the referent. There is some work on L2 learners’ use of prosody in encoding given and new information but not necessarily in the context of reference maintenance. The current study investigates how Chinese learners of Dutch use prosody (i.e. duration and pitch-related cues) in reference maintenance at different proficiency levels (intermediate vs. advanced) in Dutch via a picture-stories reading task. We have found that despite the similarities in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese in the use of prosody in reference, the intermediate learners differed from the advanced learners in not using duration and limited use of pitch. We propose an L1-transfer based account to explain this effect of proficiency