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ADULTS’ ACQUISITION
OF TONE ACCENTS IN SWEDISH’
Beata Schmid
Brown University
INTRODUCTION
‘A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Tenth Annual Boston University
Conference on Child Language Development, October 25-27, 1985. 1 wish to thank Pat
Clancy, Sheila Blumstein, Phil Lieberman, and two anonymous reviewers for extensive
comments.
185
I86 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
Accent 1 Accent 2
Accent I words
1. Native, initially stressed nouns with monomorphemic stems, e.g.
bdll ‘ball’, bdllen ‘the ball’. The addition of the definite article -en
does not change the accent type.
188 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
Accent 2 types
Accent 2 words always have a post-stress syllable. In this context I am
considering initially stressed words with bisyllabic stems, and one case of
accent shift.
1 . Native nouns, e.g. flicka ‘girl’, nalle ‘teddy-bear’.
2. Verbs ending in the stem formative -a, e.g. bada ‘bathe’, bhdar
‘bathe(s).’
3. Accent shift takes place in the following case: Nouns with
monomorphemic stems take Accent 1 in the singular: boll, bollen,
but Accent 2 in the plural: bhllar. This is actually part of a more
general rule, namely that most inflectional and derivational suffixes
require Accent 2.
(For more on accent rules, see Bruce (1977) and Girding (1977).
Dialectal Differences
There are noticeable differences in accent realization in the various
Swedish dialects (Meyer cited in Girding 1977). In this paper I am only
concerned with the types found in Southern and Central Swedish
dialects. These two types are shown in Figure 2 in the form of
schematized Fo contours.
One of the two children I recorded spoke a Southern Swedish dialect,
which means that Accent 1 is manifested as a pitch peak early in the first
Accent 1 Accent 2
syllable, while Accent 2 has one peak late in the first syllable in the adult
model. The other child spoke Central Standard Swedish. Accent 1 is
realized as one peak late in the first syllable, while Accent 2 has two
peaks, one in each syllable.
It has been shown (Bruce 1977) that there is some interference between
word accents, sentence accents and terminal juncture. To hold these
interference factors constant, I chose stimuli that present the word in
question in focus, i.e. as having a sentence accent in addition to the word
accent, if spoken by an adult native speaker. This means that the Fo
contour will have more discernable peaks and will be easier to measure.
As far as very young children are concerned, we have to keep in mind
that there rarely seems to be a distinction between words in and out of
focus, i.e., all words are more or less in focus, since we are dealing with
very short MLUs. In my limited body of data, I detected only one
instance of a stimulus word said in and out of focus. For Southern
Swedish, the Fo contours differ slightly for Accent 2 words in focus, but
hardly for Accent 1 words. In Central Standard Swedish, the only
significant peaks of the whole utterance are found in the focused word.
Therefore, it is desirable to have informants utter words in focus. For a
better comparison of adults’ and children’s data, the adults’ utterances
were kept short (MLU = 3-4).
METHODOLOGY
INFORMANTS AND SETTING
The children
The monolingual Swedish children were recorded in monthly sessions
for seven months, excluding two trial sessions. At the beginning of the
study, Petter, was 1;11 and Cecilia, the girl, was 1;6. Both children came
from middle-class Swedish speaking homes in the environment of
Boston. English was rarely spoken at home, in spite of the presence of
older siblings who went to American pre-schools. Although the children
were exposed to English in that they watched “Sesame Street” and came
into contact with English-speaking friends of their siblings and parents,
they were not themselves using English as a means of communication.
The parents of both children had adopted the strategy that all members
must speak the home language at home at all times. The result was that
the younger children were not competent in English, and they did not
mix languages, since they had only one language (unlike the case of
Hildegard (Leopold 1970), who is said to have had a mixed system till the
end of her second year). The onset of bilingualism for the children in
these families appears to have been the entrance to pre-school. The
children I interviewed had not entered pre-school at the time of
investigation. I consider the influence of English on their acquisition of
Swedish intonation minimal, if not non-existent. This is also evidenced
by the fact that the children followed the developmental stages shown by
monolingual Swedish children (cf. Bergman 1976). Whatever the nature
of the linguistic knowledge of these Swedish children living in an English-
speaking community, the results clearly indicate that the presence of
English did not interfere with these children’s acquisition of intonation.
The recording sessions were held in the homes of the children. Both the
interviewer and the caretaker interacted with the children and siblings
rarely were present.
Each session had a formal and an informal part. Upon my arrival we
would play together in an informal way, with the tape recorder on. I used
a set of pictures symbolizing everyday words which the children had to
name. In evaluating the data, the controlled stimuli and the words
192 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
Adult informants
Twelve college students at Brown University (L1 : American English)
with no previous exposure to formally taught Swedish were observed
over a period of eight months. The students were attending a two-
semester course in beginning Swedish. The class met for four hours a
week and the students were taught Central Standard Swedish. Swedish
grammar contains no inherent difficulty for American students but
pronunciation, in the most general sense, needs additional attention.
Some emphasis was placed on the teaching of prosodic features. The
students were recorded twice during the school year, once after four
months of exposure and once after eight months. The setting for these
recordings was the language lab of the university. In order to familiarize
students with the recording situation, I met with the students for
individual sessions on a monthly basis. Nevertheless, it is possible that
the students would have performed better in a “real-life” situation
(“interviewers paradox”, Labov 1972). The students’ limited knowledge
of Swedish did not permit me, however, to test more extensive
knowledge. The two interviews consisted of different parts with varying
degrees of formality (a reading task, a picture-naming task (same picture
which was used for the children)) and free speech (dialogue/picture
description). A total of 19 target words were uttered twice by each
student in the course of the interview.
ANALYSIS OF STIMULI
accents, but the gradient of the fall turns out to irrelevant (Bruce
1977:120).
Tone accents are thus mainly identified by the tonal curve. The highest
peak is the stress, and intensity measurements are not necessary to
determine the presence of tone accents, at least not in the case of
Swedish. (For Lithuanian, it has been reported that intonational
differences are irrelevant and that only intensity, and sometimes length
matters (Robinson 1968)).
One factor that influenced the spectrographic quality was the choice of
stimuli. Ideally, stimuli used in a study of tone accents should have the
following segmental composition in order to produce maximally usable
spectrograms :
1 . Words should contain sonorant consonants in order to produce
continuous, fairly undisturbed Fo contours. Voiceless obstruents
have a raising effect on the following vowel, while voiced obstruents
have a lowering effect on the Fo contour (Lofquist 1975).
2. Stimuli should contain vowels with approximately the same degree
of opening. It has been shown that the intrinsic Fo contour can
differ as much as 20-30 Hz between high and low vowels. Bruce
(1 977) recommends non-high vowels for minimal disturbances.
Originally, I had made up a corpus of stimuli that mainly consisted of
sonorant consonants and non-high vowels. However, in the trial sessions
with the children, it became apparent that only a fraction of these words
were part of such young children? vocabulary. (The sentences Bruce
(1977) uses in his study also show the high degree of unnaturalness one
has to accept in order to use perfectly analyzable stimuli.) I thus had to
abandon the principle of maximum analyzability and settle for words
that the children were familiar with. In the process of the analysis I
considered all the stimuli, and calculated the standard deviation from the
standard contours for Accent 1 and Accent 2 which I had previously
established for all stimuli containing high vowels and vowels preceded by
obstruents. Considering the possible 20-30 Hz difference (Bruce 1977)
between high and low vowels, the FO’Sof the stimuli containing high
vowels still showed a significant standard deviation from the mean Fo, so
I kept the stimuli in the corpus. Utterances with question contours were
not analyzed.
In concluding this section on methodology, I would like to stress that
spectrographic analysis was used in this context to confirm the presence
or absence of tone accents in addition to the auditory analysis. In the
Schmid 195
RESULTS
CHILDREN’S DATA ANALYSIS
Table I
Children’s assignment of stress
Initially
stressed
Acc 2 words 93 1
Initially
stressed
Acc 1 words 42 0 16
196 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
Table 2.a.
Children's acquisition of tone accents in Swedish.
Cecilia (1;7-2;O).
Table 2. b.
Children's acquisition of tone accents in Swedish
Petter (2;O-2;5)
Table 2.c.
Percentage of correct peak occurrence and overgeneralization
in the children's utterances
Cecilia Petter
~
Acquisition of stress
Only the January data are presented here, since the May data were
almost identical. The results are shown in Table 3.
The table shows that the students placed stress correctly in all but one
instance of initially stressed words (99.5 percent). Some mistakes
occurred in non-initially stressed words (banhen, upelsinen). There was
Schnid 199
Tabe 3
Acquisition of stress bjadult learners (N= 12)
In the first recording session in Jaiuary, only one case of Accent 2 use
occurred; jult&nten ‘Santa C l a d utered by student A. It is generally
found in the literature (Girding 197, Bannert 1980, Johansson 1973)
that foreigners overgeneralize Acceit 1 and use it in all polysyllabics.
This hypothesis does not hold truc for all the adults in this study.
Instead, three students had either nc peaks at all in their utterances, or
the peaks were too insignificant tc be considered tone accents. Six
students had some form of Accent lin all polysyllabic words, and three
students used mixed strategies.
For this early stage of learning !wedish as a second language, the
students are divided into two major goups: one group used no change of
pitch at all (i.e. had no peaks in the To contour at all), whereas students
of the other group used some form ojAccent 1. Three students used both
forms randomly. We can only speculite as to what the students with flat
intonation contours were doing. I stlongly suspect that they would have
sounded similar, had they spoken English, i.e. these students were
speaking with rather flat intonatior contours in English, and did not
change their manner of speaking in Swedish.
200 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
Table 4
Acquisition of tone accents by two adult learners of Swedish
Student A Student B
January May January May
Accent 1 stimuli 1 1 1 1
Analyzable utterances 5 6 1 1
Correct Accent 4 1 6 5
Incorrect Accent 0 5 0 0
No peak 1 0 1 2
Accent 2 stimuli 11 11 11 11
Analyzable stimuli 11 10 11 10
Correct Accent 2 0 5 0 2
Incorrect Accent 9 2 11 8
No peak 2 3 0 0
exceptional way. During the second major session, one student showed
an overgeneralization of Accent 2. The other is still overgeneralizing
Accent 1, but uses Accent 2 in two utterances.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS
DISCUSSION
The data presented in the preceding section indicate that both L1 and
L2 learners have problems with accent distinction. Other investigators
who have studied older children and more advanced L2 learners found
that both groups acquire tone accents relatively late. Children have
acquired accent distinction by around the age of four. For adults there
are no precise data. Johansson (1973) reports on British speakers who
had resided in Sweden for over ten years. Accent 2 words were only
mastered in 40 percent of the total cases across all speakers. This
phenomenon has been observed over and over again in Swedish as a
second language classes (Bannert 1980).
My data indicate that children and adults (at least speakers of
American English) show completely opposite patterns of tone accent
acquisition in the beginning stages: roughly, children use Accent 2 on all
polysyllables, while adults use Accent 1 most of the time. This leads us t o
the more general question of tone accent acquisition strategy. Which
strategy do children use? Is this comparable to what adults are doing?
Neither adults nor children made any significant number of stress
placement mistakes. This suggests that the problem is inherent in the
tone accent phenomenon itself and not related to stress misplacement.
202 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
CHILDREN’S STRATEGIES
ADULTSTRATEGIES
Contrastive Analysis
When an adult learns a second language, his situation is very different
from that of the child. An important factor that influences the adult
204 Language Learning Vol. 36, No. 2
PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
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