Production of English Stops by Mandarin Chinese Learners

Abstract

The study compared the oral stops produced by the Chinese learners of English with those of the American native speakers. We employed the original English TIMIT, the global Chinese TIMIT, and the L2 English TIMIT by Chinese speakers to represent the target language, source language and interlanguage. Because of the quantity and diversity of these databases, this study only selected part of the speech in which the texts were read by most American speakers and Chinese speakers for analysis. Regarding the unbalanced occurrences of stop releases, the mixed effects model was used for the statistics of the release duration comparison between the native and L2 speakers. The results showed that the Chinese speakers produced significantly longer aspirated stops than the American speakers did. A further investigation indicated that the Chinese speakers, unlike the American natives, released the final stop consonant and sometimes with an extra vowel at the end. The prolonged word final stops and inserted schwas become distinguished prosodic features of Chinese speakers' English interlanguage. Different features of stops and new allophonic rules in English prove to be difficult for Chinese learners in English acquisition. The findings can present some pedagogical implications in L2 speech learning.

English pre-fortis clipping by L2 Saudi speakers

“…The author attributed the L2 learners' relative success to L1 positive transfer. A similar finding was reached for Mandarin learners of English (Ding et al, 2019).…”

Relative Difficulty in the Acquisition of the Phonetic Parameters of Obstruent Coda Voicing: Evidence from Mandarin-Speaking Learners of French

“…In another study using a similar methodology, Wang and Wu (2001) also found a positive correlation between increased vowel length and voiced final stop identification. Taken together, the results from Flege (1989), Ding et al (2019), and Wang and Wu (2001) suggest that, at least when perceiving English, Mandarin speakers are relatively insensitive to closure voicing as a cue to coda voicing, but that they are sensitive to vowel duration cues. As argued above, we attribute this to the fact that they are sensitive to duration cues for contrasts in their L1.…”

“…However, the fact that the learners achieved a 69% accuracy rate without the voicing and stop burst cues suggests that the vowel duration cue was also very important. Ding et al (2019) specifically examined Mandarin learners' sensitivity to vowel duration in English. Fifty-six Mandarin speakers performed a forced-choice identification task in which they had to identify whether the final bilabial, alveolar or velar stop in /hVC/ words were voiceless or voiced.…”

The role of phonology in non-native word learning: Evidence from cross-situational statistical learning

“…In our design, we decided to use disyllabic words to better reflect the real Mandarin word-learning situation. In disyllabic structures, the prosodic positions (initial vs final syllable) and tonal contexts (the preceding and following tones) play a role in perception as well (Chang & Bowles, 2015;Ding, 2012;Hao, 2018). There are relatively few studies taking into account this tonal environment effect, but according to Hao (2018), English-native learners of Mandarin can identify T1 and T4 at word-initial positions better compared to T2 and T3.…”