This study compared the prosody of pronouns in English and Mandarin in broad focus, narrow focus, and given information, and examined Mandarin-speaking EFL learners' acquisition of pronoun prosody. Ten L1 English speakers, 10 L1 Mandarin speakers, and 60 L1 Mandarin English learners participated in a question-answer reading task. Acoustic analysis revealed that in English pronouns differed from content words in duration in all three information statuses, whereas in Mandarin pronouns differed from content words in maximum intensity in all three information statuses. As regards L2 acquisition of pronoun prosody, auditory and acoustic analyses revealed that the Mandarin-speaking English learners' acquisition of pronoun prosody improved with their English proficiency, yet L1 prosody impacted their phonetic realization of pronouns.
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Congchao Hua (2022) studied this question.
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