Phonetic Transfer Of Vowels From Mandarin Chinese To English In SLA

This thesis explores the phonetic transfer of vowels from mandarin Chinese to American English in second language acquisition(SLA)or in foreign language learning.It verifies the prediction of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis about learning difficulties in the phonetic aspect of the language that the similar phones between one's mother tongue and the target language are easier to grasp than different phones.With the help of this thesis,teachers will get advanced,useful and practical guidance about the students' difficulties in learning English vowels,students' knowledge will become more concrete,vivid and straightforward,and the learning process will become more effective and effortless.Four native speakers of mandarin Chinese with an experience of more than 10 years of English learning participate in this study.Eleven English vowels are compared with seven Chinese vowels through two perception tasks and one production task.The perception tasks are first carried out to determine the similarity between English and Chinese vowels,which becomes the basis of predicting learning difficulties.Then,acoustic analysis of the participants' pronunciation of vowels,the chosen English words and Chinese characters is conducted with the help of the software Praat and the formant charts.Each of their English vowel is compared with the standard pronunciation of native speakers and their own Chinese pronunciation separately.Finally,the relationship between similarity and learning difficulties is established,and the previous predictions are verified.Results show:(1)the participants can't distinguish [u] from [(?)],[?] from [(?)],especially [i] from [(?)],[(?)] from [?] while speaking even though they can distinguish [i]from [(?)] and [u] from [(?)] on the perception level;(2)the ‘identical vowels' [e] and [i] are easy to learn due to positive transfer;(3)the ‘similar vowels' [u],[o] and [(?)] are difficult due to strong L1 influence;(4)the ‘different vowels' [(?)],[(?)],[(?)] and [?] are more difficult due to negative transfer;(5)the similarity of [(?)] gained in the perception task is too high,it should be ‘different' not ‘similar' to its compared Chinese vowel and is thus hard to learn;(6)all the participants wrongly pronounce the words like top and lot with the vowel[(?)] not [?];(7)except for [(?)] and [?],the four participants' acquisition results are consistent with the predictions made before.In short,under the influence of Chinese,the higher the similarity of English vowel to Chinese vowel is,the better the acquisition result will be.