The acquisition of English vowels by Mandarin ESL learners: A study of production and perception (original) (raw)
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Production of English vowels by speakers of Mandarin Chinese with prolonged exposure to English
Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., . The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers from the same L1 background (Mandarin Chinese) who are all long-term residents in the USA (7 years minimum) and adult arrivals (> age 18). These non-native speakers (N=36) and a control group of native speakers (N=22) were recorded reading two sets of materials: the Stella paragraph (Weinberg 2012) and five sentences from Flege et al. (1999). Vowel formant measurements were extracted for all tokens from the following three pairs of vowels: [i], [e], and [a]. Euclidean distances between the z-normalized (F1, F2) mean values for the two vowels in each pair for each speaker show that the non-native speakers produce each of the three pairs significantly less distinctly than the native speakers. This finding corroborates previous similar findings and suggests that a speaker's L1 continues to have a strong influence on vowel production, despite long-term exposure to the target.
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.
Not Vowel Epenthesis: Mandarin and Japanese ESL learners’ production of English consonant clusters
Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle, 2012
The present study is based on experimental study about Japanese ESL learners' perception and production of vowel insertion. To further investigate the process of second language vowel insertion, the present study employed a reading task and a repetition task. A syllabification task was also conducted after each task. Both Japanese and Mandarin ESL participants were involved to explore the effect of language experience. The results showed that both Mandarin and Japanese ESL learners with a relatively short length of residence in Canada only occasionally inserted a short vowel in English consonant clusters when they immediately repeated sound stimuli. The betweengroup difference was that Mandarin speakers with correct phonological representations often attempted to produce consonant clusters without vowel epenthesis but occasionally failed in gestural coordination which resulted in a schwa-like vowel, while Japanese speakers mostly had incorrectly stored English consonant clusters with extra vowel phonemes in their interlanguage mental lexicon but they phonetically deleted or weakened such vowels when they imitated native English speakers' production.
Vowels of Hong Kong English: from an acoustic perspective
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2007
The present study investigated how the vowel system of the first language (Cantonese) affects the acquisition of vowels of a second language. Forty native Cantonese-speaking adults (20 males and 20 females), with ages between 19 years 4 months and 26 years 10 months were recruited. Data from the first and second formant frequencies indicated that, for both female and male speakers, production of American English vowels was influenced by the Cantonese vowel system. This is also true even for those English vowels that were found in Cantonese. The perceptual ability in identifying the English vowels was also carried out to account for the deviated production of American English. It is found that perceptual and production abilities are related. Vowels of Hong 3 Vowels of Hong Kong English: from an acoustic perspective Cantonese is a dialect of Chinese. It is the first language spoken by the people residing mainly in the southern China including Hong Kong. In Hong Kong most of the native speakers of Cantonese speak English as their second language. Although most children in Hong Kong start to learn to speak English as early as in the kindergarten, English spoken by native Cantonese speaking Hong Kong people is usually judged to be heavily accented. Accent is defined as non-native like pronunciation (e.g. Markham, 1997; Major, 2001; Flege, Bohn, & Jang, 1997). Inaccurate production of English vowels is one of the major sources of accent (Markham, 1997).
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
• French /y/ (F2/F3 close around 1900 to 2100 Hz for males) does not have an equivalent phoneme in Japanese and English, whereas /u/ (F1/F2 close < 1000 Hz) has a phonemic counterpart (high back) in both Japanese and English, but its phonetic realization is different from French /u/, with a higher F2. Flege (1987) [6] found out that it was easier for American English speakers to acquire a native-like production of French /y/ ("new" phone) than that of French /u/ ("similar" phone). Our recording of two groups of male and female adult Japanese-speaking learners of French (JLF) shows a similar tendency. We measured the formants of isolated vowels embedded in a carrier sentence read 3 times by JLFs. In the first group, consisting of 3 elementary learners who volunteered for the task, 2 learners pronounced /y/ with close F2/F3 around 2000 Hz, but none of them produced a low F2 (< 1000 Hz) for /u/. In the second group, consisting of 50 JLFs in 4 different classes and levels (elementary to upper intermediate), only 4 of them, who had all lived in a French-speaking country except one, produced /u/ with a low F2 (< 1000 Hz), whereas 20 of them pronounced /y/ with close F2/F3 at least once.
In this study we assessed age-related differences in the perception and production of American English ͑AE͒ vowels by native Mandarin speakers as a function of the amount of exposure to the target language. Participants included three groups of native Mandarin speakers: 87 children, adolescents and young adults living in China, 77 recent arrivals who had lived in the U.S. for two years or less, and 54 past arrivals who had lived in the U.S. between three and five years. The latter two groups arrived in the U.S. between the ages of 7 and 44 years. Discrimination of six AE vowel pairs /i-( /, /i-e ( /, /⑀-ae/, /ae-␣/, /␣-⌳/, and /u-␣/ was assessed with a categorial AXB task. Production of the eight vowels /i, (, e ( , ⑀, ae, ⌳, ␣, u/ was assessed with an immediate imitation task. Age-related differences in performance accuracy changed from an older-learner advantage among participants in China, to no age differences among recent arrivals, and to a younger-learner advantage among past arrivals. Performance on individual vowels and vowel contrasts indicated the influence of the Mandarin phonetic/phonological system. These findings support a combined environmental and L1 interference/transfer theory as an explanation of the long-term younger-learner advantage in mastering L2 phonology.
A preliminary study on Cantonese vowel development by young heritage children
Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2023
This study investigated the developmental pattern of Cantonese vowel system by young heritage speakers (HSs). Eighteen HSs from Vancouver aged 2;0, 4;0, and 6;0 participated in a picture-naming task; seven long vowels and four short vowels were extracted and measured. Results of acoustic analysis suggested that there was no clear distinction among the vowels produced by HSs at age 2;0, displaying a pattern of neutralization to the central position of the vowel space. Vowels became more distributed as age increased, but 6-year-old HSs' production was still more centralized compared to the reference pattern. Further comparison regarding the acquisition of vowel length contrast among HSs, homeland children, and native teenagers indicated that while reference speakers distinguish [aː] vs. [ɐ] in both vowel quantity and quality in all the environments (diphthong and close syllable), homeland children and HSs made use of the cues inconsistently according to environments.
ii ii iii iii iv iv 摘 要 本研究旨在探討臺灣高中學生在英文非高前母音上發音與感知的表現。臺灣 學生往往容易忽略本身母語中和學習目標語中這三個前母音發音特徵的不同。 本研究以實驗方式實際進行對一百零二位臺灣高中生在非高前母音上表現之 觀察。實驗的方式包含了聽力項目用的選項清單，並賦予三十六個由兩位美國人 所錄製的語音檔。另外發音項目用的朗讀文本涵蓋二十個單字，五個單句，及一 偏短段落，皆取自國中教材。選項清單及朗讀文本皆考慮到語音環境的設計，而 朗讀文本也依規模大小分為三個部份。 經過統計分析的資料顯示半數以上的學生聽覺感知上難以清楚地分辨本研 究針對的三個母音，且其感知表現並未與發音表現呈正比。在三個母音的發音上， 只有/f/呈現較顯著的問題。另外，電腦語音分析出的數值也會被檢視，並藉以整 理出英語母語人士對於臺灣學生母語發音的接受範圍為何。 英語筆試能力有高成就的受試者在發音與感知兩方面都比筆試能力低成就者 展現較好的結果，這證實了英語能力與技巧無疑地是相互交織影響的。最後，本 研究於最後一章節並提供教學上的建議及未來進一步研究可行的方向。 v v