English Speakers’ Perception of Mandarin Consonants: The Effect of Phonetic Distances and L2 Experience

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Wang, Xinchun Chen, Jidong
Copyright Year	2019
Abstract	Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of the perceived phonetic distances between Mandarin and English consonants on L2 consonant identification by English learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). Experiment 1 elicited English listeners' identification of ten target Mandarin consonants as English categories and their goodness fitting ratings of each mapping. Fit indexes, measuring the degree of mapping between Mandarin and English consonants, ranged from poor to fair, and good. Experiment 2 elicited English CFL learners' (elementary and intermediate levels) identification of Mandarin consonants in a forced choice task. Overall, the perceived phonetic distances between Mandarin and English consonants predicted the learners' correct identification of the L2 consonants. Mandarin consonants with high fit indexes to English consonants are better identified than those with lower fit indexes. More L2 experience also leads to better perceptual learning. The findings are discussed in terms of current L2 speech learning models.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://icphs2019.org/icphs2019-fullpapers/pdf/full-paper_477.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.assta.org/proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_299.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article