Abstract
The study investigated the efficacy of tonal diacritical marking in facilitating learners' accurate choice of kinetic tone direction and placement. Two groups comprising a total of 52 Saudi university students read two different lists of sentences representing fall and rise tones in English. The lists included utterances that were marked with tone diacritics and others that were clarified with some contextual clues. The data was analyzed through pitch tracks and spectrograms and was compared to native speakers' output. The findings showed that the diacritics had no effect on the direction of the rise tokens since the participants had the same result, 79 %, for both types. However, the diacritics could have distracted them slightly as their marked fall instances were 6 % worse than their unmarked counterparts. Furthermore, only 52 % of the learners were able to choose the marked words to place kinetic tones, suggesting that zero marking accompanied with short contextual clues was actually better than using diacritics when learning tone direction and placement. The overall results led to the conclusion that diacritics had either a negative or neutral effect, lending support to previous research which proved that tone marking imposes a cognitive load on readers as they are forced to follow a slow and flawed procedure to process utterances. Therefore, exposure to extensive training on diacritical interpretation should be complemented with contextualized practice data.