Interactive Prosodic Encoding of Tone, Focus and Sentence Type in L2 Mandarin: A Phonetic Study on Italian Learners

This doctoral dissertation examines the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese prosody by Italian learners, focusing on the integration of lexical tone with information structure and sentence type within minimal intonational domains. Although Mandarin tones are phonologically specified at the lexical level, their phonetic realization in speech is systematically modulated also by sentence-level prosodic factors such as focus and interrogativity. For learners from non-tonal language backgrounds, acquiring Mandarin therefore requires coordinating tonal categories with intonational patterns that exploit the same acoustic dimensions, primarily fundamental frequency (F0). Addressing a gap in previous research, which has largely emphasized tone production in isolation, this study investigates tone realization in prosodically complex contexts. Learner productions are analyzed within the framework of the L2 Intonation Learning Theory (LILt; Mennen, 2015), which accounts for cross-linguistic influence across systemic, realizational, semantic, and frequency dimensions. The empirical analysis draws on an acoustic corpus of F0 data produced by 42 intermediate Italian university learners of Mandarin and a control group of 10 native Mandarin speakers. Three interconnected studies are conducted: a baseline investigation of tone identification and production in isolated monosyllabic and disyllabic items; an analysis of the prosodic encoding of contrastive focus in disyllabic declaratives; and an examination of the interaction between tone, focus, and sentence type in declarative and echo-question contexts. Dynamic and scalar F0 parameters are modeled using Generalized Linear Mixed Models and Generalized Additive Mixed Models. The results show that learners generally preserve tonal categories in isolation but display systematic deviations under intonational pressure, including reduced pitch-range modulation and limited post-focus compression. These findings point to difficulties in higher-level prosodic integration rather than in lexical tone categorization, with individual differences—particularly musicality—significantly modulating performance. Overall, the dissertation advances current understanding of the tone–intonation interface in L2 acquisition and highlights the importance of prosody-integrated approaches in L2 Mandarin pedagogy.