Asano, Y.
University of Konstanz, Germany
The present study examines how suprasegmental features and patterns are used and modified by L2 speakers to reinforce their speech acts. Using a role-play situation we explore speakers’ repair strategies when their utterances did not fulfill a communication goal: Participants (10 Japanese learners of German and 10 German learners of Japanese) were asked to imagine themselves being in Japanese and German restaurants and to try and get the attention of a waitress (author) saying "Excuse me" to order a drink. The waitress, however, did not immediately react to their request. Thus they had to make repeated attempts to get her attention until they succeeded.
German is classified as a so-called stress-accent language whereas Japanese is known to be a non-stress-accent language and is the classic example of a "pitch-accent language". While German pitch contours signal postlexical or paralinguistic contrasts, different pitch patterns in Japanese can contribute to lexical contrasts.
The findings show that German and Japanese native speakers have different repair strategies to achieve their communicative goals. Japanese native speakers, both in their mother tongue and in German, increased the duration of the word, especially the duration of the most prominent vowel to repair their utterance. They also used more energy to produce these vowels. In contrast, German native speakers changed their intonational patterns to achieve their goal. The reason for avoiding the use of different pitch contours as a repair by Japanese native speakers can be explained by the fact, which is mentioned above, that pitch accents in Japanese and in German have different functions.
The empirical data of the present study revealed the different pragmatic functions and use of suprasegmentals between languages, which lead to negative transfers in L2 learning.