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We are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article and to Professor Wu, Minsu and Dr. Ma, Jianli at the Communication University of China as well as Mr. Rolf Nagels, Mrs. Isabel Farhadi, and Mrs. Annika Woköck at the Gymnasium am Stadtpark in Krefeld, Germany, for their help and support with data collection.
BACKGROUND
L2 Acquisition of Prosody: An Underresearched Area
Although the body of research on second language (L2) acquisition in the areas of phonetics and phonology has grown steadily in recent decades, its focus has been on the acquisition of speech segments (i.e., phonemes), whereas prosody has been largely neglected. A survey of research on the phonological and phonetic properties of nonnative speech by Gut (2009) revealed that, of the 172 empirical studies published in international journals between 1969 and September 2008, aspects of L2 intonation featured in only nine studies, and speech rhythm was investigated in only four (e.g., Mennen, 2004, for intonation; Altmann, 2006, and Kijak, 2009, for stress; Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2007, for accentuation; Lin & Wang, 2008, for rhythm). This is surprising because nontargetlike prosody is notoriously persistent even in advanced learners (e.g., Grosser, 1993; Rasier, 2003), and it is often considered to be one of the main stumbling blocks for L2 learners (e.g., "rhythm presents the greatest difficulties" [Barry, 2007, p. 98]).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the existing theoretical models of L2 phonological acquisition1have neglected to account for L2 prosodic acquisition, or they are poorly equipped to deal with different prosodic domains (e.g., rhythm and intonation). For instance, the speech learning model (Flege, 1995) and the perceptual assimilation model (Best, 1995) focus on sound segments, whereas the Universal Grammar-based model of stress acquisition (Archibald, 1994) accounts for word stress parameters only. Because these models address very specific phenomena, they cannot straightforwardly be applied to other aspects of L2 speech. Moreover, in the absence of a unified theoretical framework for L2 phonology, it is difficult to relate the models to one another, unless they were developed to deal with the same phenomenon (see Gut, 2009, for an overview of existing models).
The objective of this article is to contribute to the development...