I have worked with many L1 Chinese speakers who are learning English. Often their rhythms and intonation are influenced by Chinese, and thus are different from my own Midwest American accent. I do not find this to be objectionable, but I must tell you that in America, there are conservative people who have negative feelings about "foreign" accents.

I am sorry that I do not have empirical evidence to share.

Thank you for chiming in. I'm in the same boat as you, Michael, since I work with international teaching assistants to help them pass their spoken English assessments. I look forward to investigating the answers to these questions--hopefully some of them are already in the literature.

Chinese is one the contour languages and the acquisition of prosody features which are an inherent feature of English speech is very difficult for the Chinese speakers. However, we cannot much depend on intuitive generalizations. I have Chinese friends with excellent English accent . Therefore, it all depends on the degree of motivation and exposure.

Thanks for your reply. Motivation and exposure certainly do have something to do with it (and identity and many other factors).

I hope there are some perception studies in the literature that point to NL's perceptions of Chinese L1 speakers' English accents. I am looking for research.

The following papers may provide some information relevant to your question:

http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uclyyix/yispapers/Xu_ELT_author_version.pdf

http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uclyyix/yispapers/Wang_Zhang_Xu_SP2018.pdf

Conference Paper POST-FOCUS COMPRESSION IN ENGLISH BY MANDARIN LEARNERS

Yi Xu Many thanks!

When I was researching literature for the same topic but with regard to Russian speakers, I found some data in "Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press." And I clearly remember that she provides some data concerning speakers of Chinese as well.

Thank you--that title has definitely come up in my perusing. I appreciate the validation.

Mandarin speakers don’t usually exhibit vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. I remember there’s an empirical study on that by Zhang & Francis.

It's very important