A comparison of Spanish produced by Chinese L2 learners and native speakers---an acoustic phonetics approach

Foreign accent receives constant attention among both language teaching practitioners and researchers. From the practical perspective, foreign accent is one of the more important indices to measure the success of a language program. Many language programs make serious efforts to reduce the amount of foreign accent carried by the participating L2 learners. Also, communicative approaches in second language teaching are receiving more and more criticism due to the lack of performance of students. Many argue that more emphasis should be put on language accuracy. With the regained interest on form in the field of second language acquisition, studies on foreign accent are also receiving more and more attention.; Under this general picture, one blank space in the understanding of foreign accent remains to be filled: the acquisition of Spanish phonology by learners who speak Standard Mandarin as first language. Comparing to studies on the acquisition of English phonology by Chinese learners, which include a wide range of studies on perception, articulation and the acoustic phonetics, studies on the acquisition of Spanish phonology by Chinese learners is still largely based on the impressionistic decision rather than research methodologies that have been established and widely accepted in the field of phonetics and phonology. With the growth of popularity of Spanish among the Chinese speaking world, the lack of understanding of Spanish L2 phonology by Chinese learners has drawn more and more attention among language teachers and researchers.; This study intends to fill this gap by exploring some of the most important aspects of the phonological system of the interlanguage of Chinese L2 learners of Spanish. First, a general comparison of the phonological system of Standard Mandarin and Spanish is conducted to explore the structural difference between these two languages. Then the interlanguage of Standard Mandarin speakers is analyzed to identify structural differences between the interlanguage and the target language that may cause the perception of foreign accent.; Since a complete description and analysis is beyond the scope of a single dissertation, only a few important phonological structures are examined, including plosives, vowels and stress. The choice of the three phonological structures is based both on experience and theoretical considerations. First, they cover both segmental and suprasegmental features and are very representative linguistic structures of the target language. Second, these linguistic structures cause most confusion in language teaching and acquisition and are very robust in the sense that learners generally do not improve significantly their performance on these structures during the acquisition. This study tries to answer several important questions, such as what are the sources of foreign accent with regard to each one of the three linguistic structures and whether the foreign accent caused by these structures improves during the process of acquisition.; In Chapter 1, I offered a general review of the phonological systems of Spanish and Standard Mandarin. The review of the Spanish phonological system is conducted with more details since it is the target language under discussion. Then, the two phonological systems are compared. Both segmental and suprasegmental features are examined. Finally, I give a review of the general theories about the acquisition of L2 phonology.; In Chapter 2, the design of the three experiments is presented and the hypotheses are proposed.; Chapter 3, 4 and 5 cover in detail the experiments for three important aspect of the acquisition of Spanish by Chinese learners, including stress, plosives and vowels. Chapter 3 focuses on tire acquisition of Spanish stress by Chinese learners. Chapter 4 focuses on the acquisition of Spanish plosives by Chinese learners and Chapter 5 focuses on the acquisition of Spanish vowels by Chinese learners. In each chapter, a detailed review of the curr...