Second Language Research 28(3) 283–318 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0267658312439668 slr.sagepub.com second language research The selection of intonation contours by Chinese L2 speakers of Dutch: Orthographic closure vs. prosodic knowledge Xuliang He Nantong University, China and Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Vincent J. van Heuven Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, The Netherlands Carlos Gussenhoven Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands and Queen Mary University of London, UK Abstract Chinese learners of Dutch and a control group of native speakers of Dutch were presented with 26 sentences in the order they come in a story, visually as well as auditorily as spoken with four intonation contours. Participants were instructed to select the most appropriate intonation contour for each sentence in a forced choice task. Chinese participants selected the most appropriate version less often than the native speakers, and their selections from the three less appropriate competitors were more chaotic than those of the control group. The performance of the more proficient Chinese participants (as established in an independent test) was closer to that of the native speakers than the performance by the less proficient participants. Chinese participants employed a policy to assign rising contours to orthographic sentences closed by a question mark and falling contours to other sentences. In addition, they avoided choosing intonation contours ending in downstepped falling pitch and falling–rising pitch, pitch contours that are uncommon in their native language. The general acquisition profile follows findings in other areas of linguistic competence in that their performance correlated with age of arrival, not with either age or length of time they had been exposed to Dutch. As far as we are aware, this is the first systematic investigation of second language (L2) learners’ competence in melody selection. Corresponding author: Xuliang He, Department of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9103, NL-6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands Email: xlnick_he@hotmail.com 439668SLR 28 3 10.1177/0267658312439668He et al.Second Language Research 2012