The Differential Impact of Data Collection Methods and Language Background on English Tone Choice Patterns

This study examines the impact of spoken data collection techniques and language background on falling, level, and rising tones. Elicited data from a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), structured speech from a collaborative oral assessment task, and naturalistic speech from a comprehensive corpus of inner-circle and Hong Kong English were analyzed for Discourse Intonation features, resulting in 2756 tone choices by 184 speakers. Multinomial logistic regression indicates that structured speech by L2 English learners and naturalistic speech by both inner circle and Hong Kong English speakers exhibited similar tone choice patterns. However, DCT responses by L2 English learners contained significantly fewer level tones and more rising tones. Qualitative analyses suggest that contrary to naturalistic studies, L2 learners use rising tones to focus their attention on the speaker during a request. L1 users, on the other hand, used a variety of tone choices that focus on language and mitigate directness. Overall, these results add further evidence that DCTs do not elicit speech that generalizes to naturalistic discourse. Structured tasks in which two L2 speakers interact mirror the rates of the inner circle and Hong Kong English speakers detected in this study.