A majority of Chinese native speakers speak English with a Chinese accent. This implies that phonological characteristics from Chinese are apparent in speaking English – these include the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, as well as intonation patterns. This work will address a specific aspect, namely the question whether the fact that Chinese is a tonal language is apparent in the speaker’s pronunciation of English (a non-tonal language).

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Chinese is a tonal language, where tone serves as an integral component of linguistic expression. In psycholinguistics theory, it is supposed that in the first two years of language acquisition, the parameters are set with which a person perceives a language. When learning untoned languages, like English, would their perception of English be influenced by the tones? If Chinese speakers learn untoned languages in the same way of learning Chinese, would tones contribute to their accent in untoned languages?

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Questions to answer:

1. Do the majority of Chinese speakers perceive English words with tonal categorizations? Despite English being an untoned language, Chinese speakers might still associate tonal qualities with English words, such as assigning tones to individual syllables.

2. How does early exposure to a tonal language impact the perception of untoned languages like English?

3. How does the resulting accent of Chinese speakers learning English with tonal influences compare to non-native speakers of another untoned language, such as French?