English Speech Learning By Native Mandarin Speakers

The past few decades have seen a vast number of studies being conducted on second language(L2)segmental acquisition at home and abroad.Previous literature indicated that first language(L1)transfer plays a role in L2 production and perception.Differences in syllable structure and phonemic inventory between English and Mandarin inhibit Chinese learners' acquisition of syllable-final stop voicing.However,few studies investigated English vowel duration differences preceding voiced and voiceless stops in L2 acquisition.Therefore,the research reported in this dissertation examined Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of this rule from the perspective of production and perception.An L2 English corpus was implemented for production experiment,and minimal word pairs differing only in syllable-final stop voicing were extracted from sentences for analysis.The results showed no significant difference between vowel durations preceding voiced and voiceless stop produced by native Mandarin speakers,and the voiced-to-voiceless ratio was lower than results from previous studies.The perception experiment investigated the effects of English proficiency level,places of articulation and vowel category on the performance of Chinese learners of English in identifying the syllable-final stop voicing with the use of preceding vowel duration as a cue.The results found no significant difference between the perceptual ability for advanced and intermediate level of English learners.All else being equal,their performance varied when perception stimuli ending with stops produced in different places of articulation.In addition,higher intelligibility was discovered in the case of stops preceded by monophthongs for Chinese learners of English.In summary,the results indicated that native Mandarin speakers had learned vowel duration variation before voiced and voiceless stops partially and their performance was influenced by L1 transfer from Mandarin.This study sheds light on second language speech learning.