First language attrition and second language attainment of Mandarin-speaking immigrants in Hong Kong: Evidence from prosodic focus

ABSTRACT In the field of bilingual language development, studies of first language (L1) attrition and second language (L2) attainment have traditionally been two separate streams of research. The present study aims to investigate the L1 and L2 development of Mandarin-speaking immigrants in Hong Kong in depth from the perspective of prosodic focus via a production experiment and a perception one. The data revealed evidence of L1 Mandarin attrition in production but not in perception, and the immigrants were more attuned to acoustic cues than were the native Cantonese speakers. As the existing speech learning models cannot explain our data adequately, we propose a working model (the Bilingual Prosody Transfer Model, or BPTM) to account for the findings and to provide a reference for future work on the prosody of bilingual speakers, the basic claim of which is that prosodic features between an L1 and an L2 can be transferred, even for late L2 learners (sequential bilinguals). The current version of the BPTM only holds for late bilinguals’ production of prosody; when more data are collected and the postulates are refined, we will extend the BPTM to the perception of prosody by late bilinguals.