The Prosodic Role in English Production of Native Mandarin Children: A Systematic Review Proposal

Abstract

English, as the most widely used language globally, is increasingly valued by parents and educators. In China, a growing number of children choose English as their second language for learning after being able to use Mandarin relatively proficiently. Mandarin speakers, learning English may face many challenges, one of which is that native Mandarin speakers find it difficult to speak English naturally like native English speakers. Some scholars believe that the disparity in prosodic features between Mandarin and English is one of the key factors causing this difficulty. Compared to adult learners, children have an unstable prosodic development system, resulting in significant differences in language acquisition. Therefore, understanding the relationship between the prosodic features of Mandarin-speaking children and their English production is crucial. From the perspective of structure and purpose, this paper Outlines a systematic literature review framework, hoping to summarize the previous articles on the role of prosody in the English production of Mandarin speaking children, and provide some useful results that can help people in this field to improve their work. From the perspective of content, in this systematic literature review, we are going to propose and solve two questions: (1) Does the prosody of Mandarin influence Mandarin-speaking children’s English production? (2) If the influences do exist, what are the specific influences? To solve these two questions, we first search some articles with the searching strategies that we design. Then we plan to screen the articles that we get from searching with the inclusion criteria and the exclusion criteria that we design. Finally, we plan to use quantitative analysis to analyze these samples and give the eventual result.