A Study On The Japanese Native Speakers’ Perception Of Mandarin Affricates And Fricatives

Mandarin Chinese consonants have always been regarded as difficult points in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.L2 learners will inevitably be influenced by their mother tongue to form foreign accents in their L2 learning.Even if they possess many years of experience in L2 learning,they still can’t get rid of it because the L2 segment is perceptually assimilated into the category of L1 phonological categories,and the L2 learners’ discrimination of non-native language is also affected by the mother tongue phonology.Based on the above problems,the researchers conducted in-depth research and discussion on the perception and production of cross language vowels and consonants,and proposed the perceptual assimilation model PAM(best,1995)and the second language learning model SLM(Flege,1987,1995).These two models have been widely used in the study of second language acquisition and have been continuously verified,refuted and improved.In the field of Mandarin Chinese consonants acquisition,there are more error analysis on the production of learners learning Chinese as a foreign language,while there are relatively few studies on the perception of Mandarin Chinese consonants at home and abroad,among which the systematic use of the two scientific theoretical models for Chinese consonants acquisition is even less.The research in this field is not comprehensive and in-depth,and the theoretical interpretation of the results is still not consistent.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptual assimilation and perceptual discrimination of affricates and fricatives of Mandarin Chinese by native Japanese students in Changsha.The purpose of this thesis is to reveal whether the similarity between Japanese and Chinese will affect Chinese acquisition of Japanese learners and improve and expand the above theoretical researches.This paper will discuss the following four problems:(1)How do Japanese students perceptually assimilate Mandarin Chinese affricates and fricatives into Japanese consonants? Which assimilation type of PAM does their assimilation correspond to?(2)How do Japanese students discriminate Mandarin Chinese affricates and fricatives consonant contrasts’ different articulation manners and places?(3)What is the influence of vowel environment and Mandarin Chinese tone in perceptual assimilation and categorical discrimination by Japanese native speakers?(4)What is the relationship between the results of perceptual assimilation test and the results of categorical discrimination test?15 participants are involved in the study,and all of them are Japanese students studying in Changsha universities.The study includes perceptual assimilation test and categorical discrimination test carried out via Audacity 2.0 and E-Prime 2.0.All the data are analyzed by Excel 2010 and SPSS 21.0.This study find that:(1)From the perspective of articulation manner,the perceptual assimilation test shows that Japanese students assimilate Mandarin Chinese aspirated and unaspirated affricates into Japanese voiceless and voiced consonants.While from the perspective of articulation position,according to PAM model,C-z group(z,c,s)is TC type,C-zh group(zh,ch,sh)and C-j group(j,q,x)are CG type.(2)The perceptual discrimination test shows that J-Q group has the worst discrimination,and different articulation manners and positions will influence the perceptual discrimination of learners.(3)In the perceptual assimilation test,there is significance influence of vowel environment and Mandarin Chinese tone on the assimilation of most Mandarin Chinese affricates and fricatives,but there is little influence on perceptual discrimination test.(4)To a certain extent,perceptual assimilation test can predict part of situation of categorical discrimination test.Through the above comparative study,it is found that Japanese students can basically discriminate Mandarin Chinese affricates and fricatives,among which the discrimination of fricatives is better than that of affricates,but they still can not reach the level of native speakers.Moreover,perceptual discrimination test confirms the prediction of Best(1995)PAM based on perceptual assimilation results.However,from the perspective of perceptual similarity,it does not support the prediction of Flege’s(1995)SLM.