Document Type
Honors Thesis
Abstract
This study investigated the acquisition of Mandarin alveolo-palatal phonemes [ʨ,ʨʰ, ɕ] by English L1 learners of Mandarin. The acquisition of these phonemes is often difficult for English speakers as the alveolo-palatal place of articulation is not found in English, but this acquisition has not been extensively studied. This study consisted of two perception tasks and one production task. The first perception task was an AX discrimination task to determine participants’ ability to distinguish between Mandarin and English phonemes. This task was followed by an identification task. The production task collected auditory data, which was analyzed with Praat and compared to two native Mandarin speakers’ production. The results of the perception tasks showed learners had difficulty identifying the [ʨʰ] phoneme but not the [ʨ] and [ɕ] phonemes, confirming a previous study. The acoustic analysis confirmed the hypothesis that learners' production of the alveolo-palatal phonemes was not native-like.
Publication Date
5-1-2021
Language
English
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Sherrell, Brooke, "THE L2 ACQUISITION OF MANDARIN ALVEOLO-PALATAL PHONEMES BY NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS" (2021). 2021 Spring Honors Capstone Projects. 23.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/honors_spring2021/23