Abstract
Four experiments, all of which focused on vowel duration, assessed
Chinese subjects' production and perception of the contrast between
/t/ and /d/ in the final position of English words. Vowel duration
was measured in minimal pairs in the first experiment. The stimuli
in natural-edited beat-bead and bat-bad continua in which vowel duration
varied in 20-ms steps were then presented to native English and Chinese
subjects in a forced-choice test, in an experiment using the method
of adjustment, and in an imitation task. The non-natives who learned
English in childhood closely resembled native speakers in all four
experiments. Three groups of non-natives who had learned English
as a second language in adulthood, on the other hand, differed from
the native speakers. The late learners produced significantly longer
vowels in words ending in /d/ than /t/. However, the late learners'
vowel duration differences were much smaller than the native speakers',
and were correlated significantly with degree of foreign accent in
English. The late learners differed from the native speakers in several
ways in the two perception experiments, and also in the imitation
task. The pattern of significant and nonsignificant between-group
differences, but not data for individual subjects, was consistent
with the hypothesis that L2 (second language) production accuracy
is limited by the adequacy of perceptual representations for sounds
in the L2.
- acoustic
- comparison,english,female,humans,l2,language,male,mandarin,phonetics,speech
- factors,cross-cultural
- measurement,taiwanese,consonants,language,perception,production
- perception,speech
- production
- stimulation,adult,age
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