Perception of Consonants in Single Codas in English by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

One’s native language (L1) would interfere with the perception of a foreign language because of the differences between the sound inventories and distributions in the two languages. Compared with English, the syllable structures of Cantonese and Mandarin are relatively simple. Mandarin has only two coda consonants /n/ and /ŋ/, while Cantonese has six: /p/,/t/,/k/,/m/,/n/,/ŋ/, both languages do not allow consonant clusters. However, English allows multiple consonants in syllable final position.This study investigates Cantonese and Mandarin speakers’ perception of English consonants in single codas, and found that Cantonese who were learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) have advantages in the perception of English coda nasals and stops compared to the Mandarin speakers, but they have difficulty in identifying the voiced-voiceless contrasts in plosives. This is considered to be a result of negative transfer from their first language

A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

The general opinion about the way English borrowings enter Mandarin is that English words are preferably integrated into Mandarin via calquing, which includes a special case called Phonetic-Semantic Matching (PSM) (Zuckermann 2004), meaning words being phonetically assimilated and semantically transferred at the same time. The reason for that is that Mandarin is written in Chinese characters, which each has a single-syllable pronunciation and a self-contained meaning, and the meaning achieved by the selection of characters may match the original English words. There are some cases which are agreed by many scholars to be PSM. However, as this study demonstrates, the semantics of the borrowing and the original word do not really match, the relation considered to be “artificial” by Novotná (1967). This study analyses a corpus of 600 established English loanwords in Mandarin to test the hypothesis that semantic matching is not a significant factor in the loanword adaptation process because there is no semantic relation between the borrowed words and the characters used to record them. To measure the phonological similarity between the English input and the Mandarin output, one of the models in adult second language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995a), is used as the framework to judge the phonemic matching between the English word and the adapted Mandarin outcome. The meanings of the characters used in recording the loanwords are referred in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese to see whether there are cases of semantic matching. The phonotactic adaptation of illicit sound sequences is also analysed in Optimality Theory (McCarthy 2002) to give an account of phonetic-phonological analysis of the adaptation process. Thus, the percentage of Phono-Semantic Matching is obtained in the corpus. As the corpus investigation shows, the loanwords that can match up both the phonological and the semantic quality of the original words are very few. The most commonly acknowledged phono-semantic matching cases are only phonetic loanwords. In conclusion, this paper argues that the semantic resource of Chinese writing system is not used as a major factor in the integration of loanwords. Borrowing between languages with different writing systems is not much different than borrowing between languages with same writing system or without a writing system. Though Chinese writing system interferes with the borrowing, it is the linguistic factors that determine the borrowing process and results. Chinese characters are, by a large proportion, conventional graphic signs with a phonetic value being the more significant factor in loanword integration process

Tonal Adaptation of Loanwords in Mandarin: Phonology and Beyond

This study examines the tonal adaptation of English and Japanese loanwords in Mandarin, and considers data collected from different types of sources. The purpose overall is to identify the mechanisms underlying the adaptation processes by which tone is assigned, and to check if the same mechanisms are invoked regardless of donor languages and source types. Both corpus and experimental methods were utilized to survey a broad sampling of borrowings and a wide array of syllable types that target specific phonetic properties. To maximally rule out the effect of semantic tingeing, this study examined English place names that were extracted from a dictionary and from online travel blogs. And to explore how semantic association might interfere with the adaptation processes, this study also investigated a separate corpus of Japanese manga role names and brand names. Revisiting discussions in previous studies about how phonetic properties of the source form might affect tonal assignments in the adapted forms, this study also included an expanded reanalysis of adaptations elicited in an experimental setting. Observations made in the study suggest that the primary mechanisms behind tonal assignments for loanwords in Mandarin operate at a level beyond any usual phonological concerns: the adaptation processes are heavily reliant on factors that are inherent to Mandarin lexical distributions, such as tone probability and character frequency. Adapters apparently utilize their tacit knowledge about such distributional properties when assigning tones. Also crucial to the tonal assignment mechanism is the seeking of appropriate characters based on their meanings, either to avoid unintended readings of loanwords or to form desired interpretations. Such adaptation mechanisms are mainly attributable to the morpho-syllabic nature of the Chinese writing system, the language’s high productivity of compound words, and its high incidence of homophony. Also noted in the study is the influence of prescriptive conventions formulated for formally established loanwords. Research findings reported in this study highlight such non-phonological aspects of loanword adaptation, especially the role of the writing system, that have been underestimated to date in the field of loanword phonology and cross-linguistic studies of loanword typology

Regularities and Irregularities in Chinese Historical Phonology

With a combination of methodologies from Western and Chinese traditional historical linguistics, this thesis is an attempt to survey and synthetically analyze the major sound changes in Chinese phonological history. It addresses two hypotheses – the Neogrammarian regularity hypothesis and the unidirectionality hypothesis – and tries to question their validity and applicability. Drawing from fourteen types of “regular” and “irregular” processes, the thesis argues that the origins and impetuses of sound change is far from just phonetic environment (“regular” changes) and lexical diffusion (“irregular” changes), and that sound change is not unidirectional because of the existence and significance of fortifying and bi/multidirectional changes. The thesis also examines the sociopolitical aspect of sound change through the discussion of language changes resulting from social, geographical and historical factors, suggesting that the study of sound change should be more interdisciplinary and miscellaneous in order to explain the phenomena more thoroughly and reach a better understanding of how human languages function both synchronically and diachronically

Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation

Speech production studies have shown that phonological unit initially used to fill the metrical frame during phonological encoding is language specific, that is, a phoneme for English and Dutch, an atonal syllable for Mandarin Chinese, and a mora for Japanese. However, only a few studies chronometrically investigated speech production in Korean, and they obtained mixed results. Korean is particularly interesting as there might be both phonemic and syllabic influences during phonological encoding. The purpose of this study is to further examine the initial phonological preparation unit in Korean, employing a masked priming task (Experiment 1) and a phonological Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that significant onset (and onset-plus, that is, consonant-vowel [CV]) effects were found in both experiments, but there was no compelling evidence for a prominent role for the syllable. When the prime words were presented in three different forms related to the targets, namely, without any change, with re-syllabified codas, and with nasalised codas, there were no significant differences in facilitation among the three forms. Alternatively, it is also possible that participants may not have had sufficient time to process the primes up to the point that re-syllabification or nasalisation could have been carried out. In addition, the results of a Stroop task demonstrated that the onset phoneme effect was not driven by any orthographic influence. These findings suggest that the onset segment and not the syllable is the initial (or proximate) phonological unit used in the segment-to-frame encoding process during speech planning in Korean

Sonority and its role in the acquisition of complex coda clusters by Spanish speakers learning English as a second language

This thesis looked at the concept of sonority and its influence in the acquisition of complex coda consonant clusters by ESL Spanish speakers. An experiment was performed to test the relationship between the sonority values of the segments of final complex clusters and the rate of errors. The goal of this thesis was to test the hypothesis that the Sonority Sequencing Principle was a powerful linguistic constraint that affected the acquisition of L2 phonology. The findings confirmed the idea that sonority played a crucial role in the phonological acquisition of L2 learners. Subjects reduced the least sonorant segment of the final cluster in order to achieve the minimal sonority descent. The choice of the segment could not be attributed to possible L1 interference since Spanish did not license complex codas and any final obstruents except /s/. The minimal sonority distance factor effected the rate of errors. Subjects produced more errors in clusters where the sonority distance between their segments was small (e.g., one, two, and three)

Lexical Effects in Phonemic Neutralization in Taiwan Mandarin

BLS 38: General Session and Thematic Session on Language Contac

Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Phonology: A Comparative Analysis of the Influence of Two Dialects (Northeastern and Cantonese)

Ph. D. ThesisChinese and English belong to two distinct language families. Given that English is a lingua franca, there are millions of learners of English who speak one of the varieties of Chinese. Due to the substantial phonological differences between the two languages, Chinese learners of English may encounter difficulties when they communicate in English; developmental issues may also play a role. In addition to Mandarin, Chinese has many dialects/languages and, because these dialects/languages differ from each other, speakers of these Chinese dialects/languages pronounce English differently. It is reasonable to suppose that this behaviour is phonologically governed. The influence from the first language (L1) on second language (L2) phonology has long been viewed as an important factor (Lado, 1957; see also Anderson, 1987; Corder, 1967; Ellis, 1994; Fisiak, 1978, 1991; Gass, 1979; Odlin, 1989; Rasier and Hiligsmann, 2007; Young-Scholten, 1985). Moreover, a large number of relevant research studies on the influence of L1 on L2 have been conducted on the effects of L1 Chinese - typically Mandarin - on L2 English phonology (Li, 2006; Wang, 2007) and to a lesser extent on the influence of other L1 Chinese dialects (Chen, 2010). Why do different Chinese dialects/languages generate differences in the non-target production of English? How do different Chinese dialects/languages influence L2 English and what features, error types and specific errors do different L1 dialect/language speakers make? Questions like these can be answered partially by consulting the literature, but also need further exploration. Moreover, comparative research analysing one language (or language group) but two dialects/languages with L2 English is limited. Therefore, this study explores the phonological differences between two L1 dialects/languages to see what different effects they have on L2 phonology, and thus it contributes to filling this gap in the literature. In so doing, Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH, 1995) and Flege’s Speech Learning iv Model (SLM, 1995) are applied as theoretical frameworks. The CAH and SLM involve contradictory notions concerning categories of ‘similar’ and ‘new’ in terms of which is more difficult for the learner. Both are addressed in the present thesis to determine which can best account for the difficulties L2 English learners have in their oral production of L2 English. It needs to noted that as Groves and Mair (2008) said, Chinese situation is unique because mutual intelligibility principle is not sufficient to determine whether Chinese varieties are dialects or languages, thus, I will refer to Harbinese Mandarin and Guangzhou Cantonese as dialects as they are conventionally referred to. This research firstly compares Harbinese Mandarin and Guangzhou Cantonese which fall under the umbrella of Chinese, and to do so with respect to segments, syllable structure and stress, and their different effects on learners’ acquisition of English phonology, followed by the proposal of hypotheses based on Flege’s idea of L1-L2 similarity-based degree of difficulty in SLM. Data was collected to test these hypotheses from 65 participants from three schools at different educational levels (middle school, high school and university) from Harbin and Guangzhou. Auditory analysis, together with acoustic analysis and a native speaker’s spot check, was used to guarantee the validity of the analysis and the reliability of the results. In addition, independent-samples t-tests were carried out to check the significance of the differences in L2 English production between the two Chinese groups. The results indicate that the influence of L1 Chinese dialects/languages on L2 English is found everywhere in the sample, including in segments, syllable structure and stress, and that this influence is statistically significant. Different error types and patterns made by Harbinese and Cantonese learners of English were found. Mandarin is also v spoken by the participants and its influence can be detected from the Cantonese results. The hypotheses in the category of ‘similar’ were generally rejected and in the category of ‘new’ were completely rejected. These findings indicate that Flege’s SLM model suggesting that L1-L2 differences that are ‘similar’ are more difficult than ‘new’, cannot be supported in this context. On the contrary, Lado’s CAH, where ‘new’ differences are predicted for the difficulties L2 learners may have, was supported. In addition, the varieties of English used by Harbinese and Cantonese speakers were also checked. It seems that Harbinese speakers tend to speak American English and Cantonese speakers speak British English, but the difference is not strongly significant. Thus, it is suggested that the variety they speak may be influenced by the similarity between L1 dialects/languages and English varieties; that is to say, the dialect/language more similar to a variety of English influences oral production. With respect to the hypothesis that increased length of exposure leads to reduced error rates, the results are not completely supportive because high school subjects score best among the three levels. This may be due to factors relating to the recent evolution of English teaching in China