English attitudinal prosody performances in L 1 and L 2 speakers

Expressive behavior linked to paralinguistic meanings finds grounds in codes proposed as universals, as well as in culturespecific conventions. This study observes performances in such kinds of attitudinal prosody for USA English, produced by L1 and L2 speakers. The results show that the observed variance is linked to individual competence, to the linguistic context, and to the cultural background of the speakers. They also show that the code used to express a given speech act, code learned in the L1 language by L2 speakers of English, may be used in their L2 language. For some of these expressions, L2 speakers received higher scores than L1 speakers, suggesting that expressions conventionalized in a foreign language, are adequately fulfilling notconventionalized expressions in the L1 culture.