Accent And Tone Sandhi

In the realm of second language acquisition, the study about accent has long focused on the L1 influence on the L2 from the perspective of segmental level. However, less attention has been paid on the tone sandhi which belongs to the suprasegmentals. The current study, through the acoustic means, seeks to obtain evidence for the relationship between accent and tone sandhi in terms of transfer effect, also hoping to illustrate that transference effect does exist on tone sandhi among tonal languages. There are 20 participants from the Quqiao Middle School and 20 from Concord University College, all of whom are Putian dialect—Mandarin bilinguals. All the participants are required to read aloud the words and sentences written on the testing paper. All the sound is recorded by Cooledit software and the data are collected for further analysis. The result demonstrates that transfer effect does exist on the tone sandhi level, and tone sandhi in Putian dialect will block the production of Mandarin tone sandhi, thus causing speakers'accent. In addition, with the increasing exposure of L2, tone sandhi in Putian dialect will be altered, evidenced the inevitable reverse transfer effect on the suprasegmentals.