Vowel Context Affects Danish L 2 Chinese Learners ’ Identification of Postalveolar Sibilants (original) (raw)
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Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
Mandarin Chinese has dental, palatal, and retroflex sibilants, but their contrasts before [_i] are avoided: The palatals appear before [i] while the dentals and retroflexes appear before homorganic syllabic approximants (a.k.a. apical vowels). An enhancement view regards the apical vowels as a way to avoid the weak contrast /si-ɕi-ȿi/. We focus on the dental vs. palatal contrast in this study and test the enhancement-based hypothesis that the dental and palatal sibilants are perceptually less distinct in the [_i] context than in other vowel contexts. This hypothesis is supported by a typological survey of 155 Chinese dialects, which showed that contrastive [si, tsi, tsʰi] and [ɕi, tɕi, tɕʰi] tend to be avoided even when there are no retroflexes in the sound system. We also conducted a speeded-AX discrimination experiment with 20 English listeners and 10 Chinese listeners to examine the effect of vowels ([_i], [_a], [_ou]) on the perceived distinctiveness of sibilant contrasts ([s-ɕ], [ts-tɕ], [tsʰ-tɕʰ]). The results showed that the [_i] context introduced a longer response time, thus reduced distinctiveness, than other vowels, confirming our hypothesis. Moreover, the general lack of difference between the two groups of listeners indicates that the vowel effect is language-independent.
Perceiving L2 Phonological Contrasts: Korean and English Sibilants
2011
Two perceptions of Korean and English sibilants by two different L2 groups were examined: the identification of Korean (KO) contrast /s-s*/ by American English (AE) learners of Korean and the identification of English (EN) contrast /s-ʃ/ by Korean ESL learners. The results of the first experiment showed that AE beginning learners of Korean poorly identified the Korean contrasts (with chance accuracy) and AE advanced learners of Korean showed perceptual improvement, but not as good as those of native speakers of Korean. However, the results of the second experiment showed that both Korean ESL beginning and advanced learners identified the English contrast with native-like accuracy. The conclusion is that L2 experience made a difference in perceptual improvement in L2 phonology acquisition. However, the contradictory results in terms of the dramatically different degrees of improvement may result from different phonetic similarity between L1 and L2 sounds and each sound of an L2 contr...
The Perception of Cantonese Vowel Length Contrast by Mandarin Speakers
Language and Speech, 2020
The study investigates the perception of vowel length contrasts in Cantonese by native Mandarin speakers with varying degrees of experience in Cantonese: naïve listeners (no exposure), inexperienced learners (~1 year), and experienced learners (~5 years). While vowel length contrasts do not exist in Mandarin, they are, to some extent, exploited in English, the second language (L2) of all the participants. Using an AXB discrimination task, we investigate how native and L2 phonological knowledge affects the acquisition of vowel length contrasts in a third language (L3). The results revealed that all participant groups could discriminate three contrastive vowel pairs (/aː/–/ɐ/, /ɛː/–/e/, /ɔː/–/o/), but their performance was influenced by the degree of Cantonese exposure, particularly for learners in the early stage of acquisition. In addition to vowel quality differences, durational differences were proposed to explain the perceptual patterns. Furthermore, L2 English perception of the participants was found to modulate the perception of L3 Cantonese vowel length contrasts. Our findings demonstrate the bi-directional interaction between languages acquired at different stages, and provide concrete data to evaluate some speech acquisition models.
Languages, 2020
This study investigates native English CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners' difficulties with Mandarin consonants at the initial stage of learning and explores the relationship between second language (L2) speech perception and production. Twenty-five native English CFL learners read the eight Mandarin consonants (j/tC/, q /tC h /, x /C/, zh /tù/, ch /tù h /, sh /ù/, z /ts/, and c /ts h /) in sentences and identified the target sounds in a forced-choice identification task. Native Mandarin listeners identified the consonants produced by the learners and rated the quality of each sound they identified along a scale of 1 (poor) to 7 (good). The learners' mean percentage accuracy scores ranged from 29% to 80% for perception and 25% to 88% for production. Moderate correlations between the perception and production scores were found for two of the eight target sounds. The Mandarin retroflex, palatal, and dental fricatives and affricates, though all lack counterparts in English, pose different problems to the English CFL learners. The misperceived retroflex and palatal sounds were substituted with each other in perception but mis-produced palatal sounds were substituted with each other, not with retroflex sounds. The relationship between perception and production of L2 consonants is not straightforward. The findings are discussed in terms of current speech learning models.
ICPhS, 2015
This study investigates the perceptual confusion of English obstruents in the coda position by Mandarin and Korean-speaking L2 learners. The two languages differ in that Mandarin does not allow obstruent codas, while Korean neutralizes underlying laryngeal and manner contrasts into voiceless stop codas. The stimuli are eight English obstruents /p b t d f v θ ð/ combined with the vowel /ɑ/. 41 Mandarin and 40 Korean speakers participated in an identification task. The results show that the Mandarin speakers generally achieved higher accuracy than the Koreans. The errors are further analysed based on their voicing, manner, and place confusions. Both groups exhibited a bias toward voiceless consonants, fricatives, and labial responses. The similarity of the two L1 groups suggests a strong and pervasive languageindependent tendency in speech perception.
The Emergence of L2 Phonological Contrast in Perception: The Case of Korean Sibilant Fricatives
2012
The perception of non-native speech sounds is heavily influenced by the acoustic cues that are relevant for differentiating members of a listener's native (L1) phonological contrasts. Many studies of both (naïve) non-native and (not naïve) second language (L2) speech perception implicitly assume continuity in a listener's habits of perceptual attention ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It's hard to express my gratitude in just a few paragraphs, but I'll try. In chronological order, I would like to thank Profs. Chungmin Lee, Chan Park, Carl Pollard, and Chris Brew for encouraging me to pursue graduate studies in the first place. It has been an amazing five years, and I am grateful for their initial guidance and support. I would like to thank my phonetics teachers, Profs. Mary Beckman and Cynthia Clopper, for their insightful and patient tutelage. In the future I will be pleased if I can be half as good a teacher to my students as they have been to me. I would also like to thank Prof. Shari Speer for serving on my committee in the midst of her busy schedule, and Prof. Benjamin Munson for being so supportive, especially during my last year here. I am also grateful to several other OSU faculty members for their support and guidance over the past few years, in particular Profs.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
This study examines how the concept of L1-L2 dissimilarity should be addressed from a two-way perspective in L2 segment learning, and how it relates to the learning outcomes. We achieved this by investigating the productions of the post-alveolar fricatives /ʃ, ʒ/ by Mandarin and Mandarin/ Wu speakers, which were subsequently assessed by native English listeners. In the first experiment, we analyzed the spectral moments of /ʃ, ʒ/ produced by Mandarin monolingual and Mandarin/Wu bilingual speakers to find out how the two groups of speakers pronounced the target segments. In the second experiment, native English listeners were tasked with rating the accentedness of the Mandarin-and Mandarin/Wu-accented /ʃ, ʒ/. Results showed native English listeners scored Mandarin/Wu-accented /ʃ/ as having no accent and Mandarin-accented /ʒ/ as having a heavy accent, indicating that English natives perceived the 'native vs. nonnative' segment dissimilarity differently from Chinese learners of English, and that the L1-L2 dissimilarity perceived from both sides may work together in defining the L2 segment learning outcomes.
The present study examined how non-native speakers produce and perceive a voicing contrast that does not exist in their native language, and which is importantly signaled by an acoustic cue which has a very different function in the native language. Danish has no fricative voicing contrasts, which in English occur in initial, medial, and final position. An important acoustic cue for the final voicing contrasts in English is the duration of the preceding vowel. In Danish, vowel duration is used to contrast vowels. In Experiment 1, Danish learners of English produced only a small and nonsignificant difference in the vowel:fricative ratio, but Experiment 2 revealed that the same learners differentiated the final voicing contrast perceptually, influenced by vowel duration much like the native speakers. The overall results imply that although L2 learners do not produce certain unfamiliar contrasts native-like, they can use L2 cues to differentiate contrasts in perception.