The De-accent In Putonghua And The Phonological Deviation Of Dialect

The present study probed into the de-accent in Putonghua (L2) and the phonological deviation of dialect (L1) in early Minnan dialect-Putonghua bilinguals.41 participants were recruited in the experiment, with 6 Minnan dialect monolinguals as control group for dialect norm,5 (near-) Putonghua monolinguals as control group for Putonghua norm and 30 Minnan dialect-Putonghua bilinguals as subjects composed of two groups (2nd and 8th graders respectively) with 15 people in each. Two picture-naming tasks were conducted to extract the productions of dialect and Putonghua vowels. Results of acoustic analysis indicated that interaction at the segmental level did exist between two typologically similar languages. On one hand, L1 dialect experience resulted in accented L2 Putonghua vowel but sufficient L2 experience would contribute to successful L2 vowel production. On the other hand, L2 Putonghua learning led to deviations of L1 dialect vowel production. How much L1 and L2 interact with each other seemed to depend on the amount of L2 experience and the degree of acoustic similarity between L1 and L2 vowels. Overall, there was no significant inverse correlation between the bilingual's L1 and L2 vowel proficiencies. The present study provided some supportive evidence for the assumption that L1 phonetic system and L2 phonetic system coexisting in a bilingual's mind might undergo reorganization due to interaction.