Perceptual cue weighting in L1 and L2 Chinese: An investigation of aspiration and frication in Chinese obstruents by Danish learners

Chinese as a Second Language Research Pub Date : 2019-04-01 DOI:10.1515/caslar-2019-0003

M. Yan, M. Sloos

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract An important part of second language acquisition of sound systems involves the distinction between phoneme contrasts that exist in L2 but not in L1. However, L1 and L2 listeners do not always use the same acoustic cues to perceptually distinguish the contrasts. Most studies concentrate on vowel perception, but perceptual cue weighting in consonants is somewhat under-investigated, although equally relevant. This article investigates the cue-weighting of Chinese /t th ts tsh/ by L1 and Danish L2 listeners. The four phonemes are contrastive, and distinguished in aspiration, frication or both. Moreover, Chinese /th ts tsh/ acoustically all overlap with a single phoneme in Danish /ts/, variably realized as [ts] ~ [th], which make it notoriously difficult to acquire the contrasts. We conducted a cue-weighting experiment to investigate how Danish and Chinese listeners use aspiration and frication to perceptually categorize these Chinese sounds. Our results show that Danish learners are not as sensitive as native Chinese to the deciding cues to distinguish the Chinese phoneme contrasts. This study sheds light on L2 sound acquisition in which different phonemes in the target L2 language correspond to a single but variable phoneme in the native language.

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汉语母语和二语的知觉线索权重:丹麦学习者汉语障碍中渴望和摩擦的调查

二语语音系统习得的一个重要部分涉及到二语中存在而母语中不存在的音素对比的区分。然而，第一语言和第二语言的听者并不总是使用相同的声音线索来感知区分对比。大多数研究集中在元音感知上，但对辅音的感知线索权重的研究有些不足，尽管同样相关。本文调查了母语和丹麦语二语听者对汉语/t /t /的提示权重。这四个音素是对比的，在发音、发音或两者都有区别。此外，汉语/th / tsh/在声学上都与丹麦语/ts/中的单个音素重叠，不同的音素被理解为[ts] ~ [th]，这使得获得对比非常困难。我们进行了一个线索加权实验，以调查丹麦和中国的听众如何使用渴望和摩擦来感知分类这些汉语声音。结果表明，丹麦语学习者在区分汉语音素对比时，对决定性线索的敏感度低于汉语母语学习者。本研究揭示了目标二语的不同音素对应于母语中单一但可变的音素的二语语音习得。

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来源期刊

Chinese as a Second Language Research Arts and Humanities-Language and Linguistics

CiteScore

0.30

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Chinese as a Second Language Research (CASLAR) focuses on research on the acquisition, development, and use of Chinese as a Second Language. It supports scholars and researchers from different linguistic fields, and serves as a forum to discuss, investigate, and better understand Chinese as a Second Language. Each issue (2 per year) of the journal publishes three papers in Chinese and three papers in English; summaries are always provided both in Chinese and English. We are especially interested in publishing articles and research papers that investigate how empirical findings of CSL research can advance and develop better Chinese language teaching methodologies, explore the implications of CSL research for theoretical developments and practical applications, focus on the acquisition and use of varieties of CSL, study the nature of interaction between native speakers and non-native speakers of Chinese, address major issues of second language acquisition from the perspective of CSL, analyze the ways in which language is both shaped by culture and is the medium through which culture is created.