The Influence Of Dialect Experience On The Phonological Perception Of Mandarin

Multitudinous investigations of cross-language perception have circled around the studies of nontonal-language perception. Motivated by the antecedent empirical and theoretical researches, the study addresses the issue of whether Minnan dialect experience influences Mirman dialect bilinguals' perception of Mandarin voiceless bilabial stops.Two experiments were designed to detect such a perception of the Mandarin bilabial voiceless stop categories contrast -/ph/ and/p/, which also were onset consonants in Mirman dialect. The findings revealed that Minnan dialect did "twist" Minnan dialect bilinguals' L2 perception due to the three categories contrast of voicing bilabial stops-/ph/,/p/and/b/(nonaspirated voiced bilabial stop) in Minnan dialect. However, the performance of the sixth-grade Minnan dialect bilinguals indicated that the increasing L2 knowledge enhances their L2 perception. In addition, the results illumed that Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model [PAM] (Best, 1995) need further explanations to tackle with this "subset" problem of L2 perception when the native language has a wider phoneme inventory.