Perceptual category mapping between English and Korean obstruents in non-CV positions: Prosodic location effects in second language identification skills

Abstract

This study examines the degree to which mapping patterns between native language (L1) and second language (L2) categories for one prosodic context will generalize to other prosodic contexts, and how position-specific neutralization in the L1 influences the category mappings. Forty L1-Korean learners of English listened to English nonsense words consisting of /p b t d f v θ ð/ and /ɑ/, with the consonants appearing in pre-stressed intervocalic, post-stressed intervocalic, or coda context, and were asked to identify the consonant with both Korean and English labeling and to give gradient evaluations of the goodness of each label to the stimuli. Results show that the mapping patterns differ extensively from those found previously with the same subjects for consonants in initial, onset context. The mapping patterns for the intervocalic context also differed by position with respect to stress location. Coda consonants elicited poor goodness-of-fit and noisier mapping patterns for all segments, suggesting that an L1 coda neutralization process put all L2-English sounds in codas as "new" sounds under the Speech Learning Model (SLM) framework (Flege, 1995). Taken together, the results indicate that consonant learning needs to be evaluated in terms of position-by-position variants, rather than just being a general property of the overall consonant systems.

Production of English Stops by Mandarin Chinese Learners

“…Therefore the statistics of the voiceless aspirated stops would be much longer in L2, especially for /t/s. The study supports the view that adult Mandarin learners of L2 English have persistent difficulties in producing coda consonants ( [4], [24], [5], [6]).…”

“…L2 productions may take on a systematic form which is intermediate to the native language (L1) and the target language. Production of English stops by foreign speakers has been a highly effective means of testing the interlanguage hypothesis in many studies of L2 acquisition ( [4], [5], [6]). For instance, Mandarin Chinese has both unaspirated (/b, d, g/ ) and aspirated (/p, t, k/ ) stops [7].…”

L2 speech learning of European Portuguese /l/ and /ɾ/ by L1-Mandarin learners: Experimental evidence and theoretical modelling

“…This result, together with findings from chapter 2, corroborates earlier findings on cross-linguistic phonotactic restriction in L2 phonological categorization (e.g. de Jong et al, 2009;Li & Zhang, 2017;Park & de Jong, 2017;Rasmussen & Bohn, 2019), suggesting that L2 segmental acquisition is not only subject to the relationship between L1 and L2 categories, but also constrained by more abstract phonological restrictions, namely the learners' L1 phonotactics. Our findings can in no way be regarded as evidence against the universal salience of onset position, especially in L1 and L2 phonological acquisition.…”

Perceptual attention as the locus of transfer to nonnative speech perception

“…What is crucialbecause it could lead to difficulty in L1 Korean listeners' perception of English final stops-is the degree of perceived phonetic disparity between Korean and English final stops (cf. Park & de Jong, 2017, for perceptual mapping data suggesting that L1 Korean listeners perceive both released and unreleased English coda stops as unlike Korean stops).…”