Prosodic and phonetic aspects of paralinguistic utterances with the German modal particle schon in L1 and L2

In this study, prosodic aspects of the German modal particle schon are investigated, expressing three kinds of paralinguistic information, “conviction,” “reservation,” and “rebuttal.” To clarify if there are common vs. language-dependent prosodic aspects of utterances with MP schon conveying paralinguistic meaning in L1 and L2, both production and perception experiments for L1 native speakers and L2 Japanese learners of German at the A1 level were conducted. Japanese nonlearners of German (NL) also attended the perception experiment, to compare the results with L1 speakers and L2 learners of German. The results in production show common prosodic properties in L1 and L2 on the one hand, such as longer duration of utterance, larger pitch range, and higher F1 in the accented vowel in the “rebuttal” utterance; but we also found language-dependent properties, such as lower pitch and higher intensity in the whole utterance in “rebuttal” by L1 speakers, while higher mean pitch and lower intensity in “rebuttal” utterances by L2 speakers were observed. In perception, the results show common tendencies in L1 and L2, such as perceptual confusion between “conviction” and “rebuttal,” although the overall percentage of correct answers by L1 speakers was significantly higher than by L2 speakers and Japanese nonlearners.