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- Title
English Vowel Discrimination and Assimilation by Chinese-Speaking Learners of English.
- Authors
Yi-hsiu Lai
- Abstract
The tense-lax vowel contrast, which is present in English but not in Mandarin, has been extensively studied in the interlanguage phonology for Chinese-speaking learners of English. Much research has been dedicated to this language production, but few studies focus on L2 learners' discriminatory and assimilatory patterns of English vowels. Experiment 1 of this study investigated Chinese-speaking learners' English vowel discrimination. Experiment 2 examined how these learners classified English vowels and assimilated them to Mandarin phonetic categories. The current findings, though supporting the Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995), were in disagreement with the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM) (Best 1995). To draw on the facts from markedness effects, the researcher argues that the assimilatory patterns between L1-L2 segments in PAM may not fully account for the perception saliency hierarchy and suggests one tri-dimensional model for interpreting L2 vowel perception.
- Subjects
ENGLISH Landscapes Ltd.; ENGLISH vowels; ASSIMILATION (Phonetics); DISCRIMINATION learning; INTERLANGUAGE (Language learning); PHONOLOGY; SPEECH education; CHINESE people; MANDARIN dialects
- Publication
Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 2010, Vol 36, Issue 2, p157
- ISSN
1810-7478
- Publication type
Article