The effect of orthography in Mandarin speakers’ production of English voiceless stops

Abstract

This article provides a review of previous studies that have examined the effects of orthography on establishing contrastive phonological representations in second language acquisition and presents results from an original study on Mandarin speakers’ production of English stops investigating how the presence of orthography affects the production of phonological categories that involve allophony. English voiceless stops are canonically represented as aspirated [ph, th, kh] in word-initial/stressed onset positions but are realized as unaspirated [p, t, k] following /s/ and in unstressed, non-initial onset positions. The results of our imitation experiment showed that Mandarin speakers failed to correctly imitate the unaspirated allophones when presented with written input, and this orthographic effect was stronger with nonwords than with real words. These results are best explained by an orthography effect mediated by phonological awareness and prior linguistic experience.

Cross-Scriptal Orthographic Influence on Second Language Phonology

“…The studies in this section indicate that distinct script input can support the lexical encoding (Hao and Yang 2021) and the perception and production of nonnative contrasts (Mok et al 2018), as well as the spoken word recognition of rule-governed phonological variants (Han and Kim 2022). The only study to indicate that distinct script input had an inhibitory effect for experienced learners was in the context of producing allophones in pseudowords, and this effect did not extend to real words (Lu and Lee 2023). However, it may be the case that the benefits of distinct script inputs are limited by various factors, such as lack of familiarity, systematicity, and perceptibility of the target phonology.…”

“…Several studies have also looked at cross-scriptal orthographic effects on L2 allophonic variation. Lu and Lee (2023) conducted an imitation production task with experienced L1 Mandarin learners of L2 English. They found that the accurate production of allophonic unaspirated stops was impeded by exposure to distinct Roman script input, in comparison to audio-only imitation.…”

“…Thus, the authors argue that L2 learners restructure phonological representations according to orthographic input, including allophonic variation. Considering the large effect sizes and the recent findings from Lu and Lee (2023), it would be of interest to further investigate these effects with a larger sample per group, and compare real and pseudowords.…”