Categorical Perception Of /n/ And /l/ In Mandarin And English By Chinese College Students

The present study intends to investigate the influences of acoustic space of mother tongue speech sounds on speakers' perception patterns of the speech sounds in the second language and foreign language by exploring Jilu Mandarin speakers and Xi' nan Mandarin speakers' perception conditions of the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ in Mandarin and English.Specifically,three research questions are included in this study.(1)What are the differences between Jilu Mandarin speakers and Xi' nan Mandarin speakers' perception performance of the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ in Mandarin and English?(2)What are the differences of the two groups' perception categories?(3)How does mother tongue acoustic space influence speakers' perception of the speech sounds in the second language and foreign language?Jilu Mandarin and Xi' nan Mandarin are important sub-branches of modern Chinese dialects.Jilu Mandarin distinguishes the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ articulately but Xi' nan Mandarin does not.The nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ in are selected as the research objects in the present study.The sound stimuli used in the present study include natural sound stimuli and synthetic sound stimuli in Mandarin and English.The initial consonant of each target sound stimulus is either the nasal /n/ or the lateral /l/.In the present study,24 participants are required to do identification test and discrimination test.The major findings of the present study accord with the Perceptual Assimilation Model and can answer the research questions.(1)Jilu Mandarin speakers' identification accuracy and discrimination accuracy of the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ are significantly higher than those of Xi' nan Mandarin speakers.(2)The clear categorical boundaries between the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ in Mandarin and English by Jilu Mandarin speakers in the identification test are verified in the discrimination test.There appears no categorical boundary between the nasal /n/ and the lateral /l/ neither in Mandarin nor in English by Xi' nan Mandarin speakers.(3)The acoustic space of mother tongue speech sounds influences speakers' perception patterns of the speech sounds in the second language and foreign language.Speakers tend to assimilate the speech sounds in the second language and foreign language with their counterparts in mother tongue.As a result,it is easy for speakers to perceptually discriminate those speech sounds that are articulately distinguished in mother tongue and vice versa.The present study can be applied in the studies of language intelligibility,phonology teaching and dialect speech sounds synthesis and recognition technology.