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

Mengzhu Yan; Marjoleine Sloos

doi:10.1515/caslar-2019-0003

Article

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

Mengzhu Yan
Mengzhu Yan is a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She earned her MA in Linguistics from Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research areas are Phonetics and Phonology, Second Language Acquisition, Syntax, Semantics, Psycholinguistics and Information Structure. She has co-authored articles on Danish acquisition of Chinese phonetics and phonology.
and Marjoleine Sloos
Marjoleine Sloos is researcher at the Fryske Akademy (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences). Her main interests are phonology and phonetics and human perception in general. She applies phonetic and phonological research to multilingualism and L2 acquisition as well as sociolinguistic variation. The languages she investigates are Chinese, Dutch and Frisian among others.

Published/Copyright: April 30, 2019

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From the journal Chinese as a Second Language Research Volume 8 Issue 1

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 t^h ts ts^h/ by L1 and Danish L2 listeners. The four phonemes are contrastive, and distinguished in aspiration, frication or both. Moreover, Chinese /t^h ts ts^h/ acoustically all overlap with a single phoneme in Danish /t^s/, variably realized as [t^s] ~ [t^h], 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.

摘要：

正确区分第二语言中的对立音位是二语语音习得的一个重要方面。从感知角度而言，母语使用者和二语习得者并不总是依赖相同的语音线索来区分对立音位。目前，对语音线索权衡的研究大多侧重于元音的感知，而辅音感知方面的研究相对较少。本文研究了汉语母语者与丹麦汉语学习者对汉语辅音/t t^h ts ts^h/ 的语音线索权衡，这四个对立音位由送气和摩擦等特征进行区分。值得注意的是，汉语辅音 /t^h ts ts^h/ 在发音上均与丹麦语辅音 /t^s/ 相似。本文采用语音线索权衡实验，旨在研究汉语母语者和丹麦汉语学习者如何使用不同的语音线索对这四个汉语辅音进行感知。结果表明，丹麦汉语学习者对起决定性作用的语音线索的敏感度相比母语者较弱。

Keywords: cue-weighting; L2 Chinese; second language acquisition; phoneme contrast

关键词：: 语音线索权衡; 汉语作为第二语言; 二语习得; 对立音位

About the authors

Mengzhu Yan

Mengzhu Yan is a PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She earned her MA in Linguistics from Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research areas are Phonetics and Phonology, Second Language Acquisition, Syntax, Semantics, Psycholinguistics and Information Structure. She has co-authored articles on Danish acquisition of Chinese phonetics and phonology.

Marjoleine Sloos

Marjoleine Sloos is researcher at the Fryske Akademy (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences). Her main interests are phonology and phonetics and human perception in general. She applies phonetic and phonological research to multilingualism and L2 acquisition as well as sociolinguistic variation. The languages she investigates are Chinese, Dutch and Frisian among others.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ocke-Schwen Bohn for his guidance and suggestions to the MA thesis that underlies this paper. We also thank Mads Lundegaard for assistance during the Danish experiments. We are grateful to Sasha Calhoun, Paul Warren and Sidsel Rasmussen for their expert comments on the manuscript, and Rolando Coto Solano and Lisa Woods for their statistical advice.

A Appendix

Table 5:

The coefficients, standard error and p values from the multinomial regression test in R (formula ^[8]=response ~ fri+asp+FL+fri:FL+fri:asp+asp:FL+fri:asp:FL). Reference level=c. ^[9].

Coefficients:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	0.909	-0.054	0.006	-0.209	0.032	-0.000	-0.005	0.000
z	0.717	-0.005	-0.030	-0.761	0.013	-0.000	0.006	-0.000

Std. Errors:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	0.000	0.003	0.001	0.000	0.003	0.000	0.001	0.000
z	0.000	0.001	0.002	0.000	0.001	0.000	0.003	0.000

p:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001
z	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	1	0.078	0.966

Reference level=z Coefficients:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	0.192	-0.049	0.036	0.552	0.018	-0.000	-0.010	0.000

Std. Errors:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	0.000	0.003	0.002	0.000	0.004	0.000	0.003	0.000

p:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	FLD	fri:FLD	fri:asp	asp:FLD	fri:asp:FLD
t	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001	<.001

Table 6:

The coefficients, standard error and p values from the multinomial regression test in R (formula=response ~ fri+asp+year+fri:year+asp:year). Reference level=c.

Coefficients:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	yearBA2	yearBA3	yearMA	fri:yearBA2	fri:yearBA3	fri:yearMA	asp:yearBA2
t	0.644	-0.014	0.002	0.232	0.385	0.542	-0.027	-0.027	-0.009	-0.002
z	0.214	0.003	-0.020	-0.431	0.194	-0.474	0.005	0.010	0.009	-0.005

	asp:yearBA3	asp:yearMA
t	-0.002	-0.006
z	-0.041	-0.001

Std. Errors:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	yearBA2	yearBA3	yearMA	fri:yearBA2	fri:yearBA3	fri:yearMA	asp:yearBA2
t	0.152	0.002	0.001	0.249	0.252	0.290	0.004	0.003	0.004	0.002
z	0.195	0.003	0.002	0.306	0.342	0.387	0.004	0.005	0.005	0.003

	asp:yearBA3	asp:yearMA
t	0.002	0.002
z	0.005	0.003

p values:
	(Intercept)	fri	asp	yearBA2	yearBA3	yearMA	fri:yearBA2	fri:yearBA3	fri:yearMA	asp:yearBA2
t	<.001	<.001	0.152	0.350	0.126	0.062	<.001	<.001	0.021	0.286
z	0.270	0.300	<.001	0.159	0.570	0.220	0.206	0.044	0.063	0.076

	asp:yearBA3	asp:yearMA
t	0.367	0.022
z	<.001	0.767

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Published Online: 2019-04-30

Published in Print: 2019-04-24

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https://doi.org/10.1515/caslar-2019-0003

Keywords for this article

cue-weighting; L2 Chinese; second language acquisition; phoneme contrast