LONGITUDINAL CHANGES IN THE USE OF PARATONES IN L2 ENGLISH SPEECH BY MANDARIN SPEAKERS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First language (L1) English speakers have been observed to organize their oral discourse into macro-units analogous to paragraphs in writing. These units, called paratones (BROWN, 1977) or phonological paragraphs (TENCH, 1996; THOMPSON, 2003), are characterized by extra high pitch at the beginning of a new discourse topic (YULE, 1980). The present study investigated how seven second language (L2) graduate students’ use of paratones developed naturalistically during their first six months immersed in an L2 environment. The participants, all L1 speakers of Mandarin, were recorded delivering four short academic presentations at approximately two-month intervals. Presentations given by two native English speakers were also analyzed for comparison. Overall, the L2 participants’ pitch peaks at topic shifts were considerably less prominent than those observed in the native-speaker data. Only one participant’s use of paratones seemed to change over time, showing improvement from the beginning to the end of the study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".