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Abstract
This study examined the effect of information about native/non-native speaker status on non-native listeners’ perception of English words with word-final stops. A survey study conducted with 38 Chinese learners of English in Guangzhou, China examined their stereotypes about Cantonese English. They described it negatively and named features including flat intonation and deleted/incomplete word-final sounds. Fifty-two learners from the same university participated in the listening study. These participants listened to recordings by a native American-English speaker. Half of the participants were told that the speaker was American, whereas the other half were told that she was Cantonese. When the speaker was said to be American, listeners tended to hear words as produced with a fully released stop, including aspiration and/or an epenthetic vowel, although aspiration/an epenthetic vowel was often not present. When the speaker was said to be Cantonese, listeners tended to hear stops as actually produced, whether fully released or not. The results reveal that non-native listeners do not necessarily judge the pronunciation of non-native speakers according to stereotypes, such as the stereotype that Cantonese-accented English does not release word-final stops. However, their idealised perception of native English results in more negative perception of the same features in non-native speech.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, Yufeng Gui for statistical suggessions and Lucy Pickering for her helpful feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Notes
1. No research has been found on English pronunciation problems encountered by Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou, where the present study was conducted. There are two main reasons. First, Mandarin is the official language in Mainland China. Since everyone is required to learn Mandarin starting from kindergarten, research on Mandarin speakers’ problems is considered to be applicable to the majority of English learners in China. Second, both Cantonese and Mandarin are treated as dialects of the Chinese language. Most researchers in China thus do not see the need to distinguish between Mandarin English and Cantonese English.
2. We originally included a task that tested whether labelling a speaker as American or Cantonese would influence listeners’ comprehension of a 64-word description of an English course. We found no effect of the different labels, but since the passage was very short and only four multiple choice questions were used to test listeners’ comprehension, it is possible that a longer text with a larger number of test items and/or open-ended ones might find a different result.
3. Since all the response sheets were collected anonymously, we had no way of knowing which response sheets were completed by these two students who were from other provinces. However, typically non-Cantonese speakers become aware of the features of Cantonese English after they have lived in Cantonese-speaking areas for some time. We thus believe it is safe to include the data of these two students.
4. A Chi-square test assumes random sampling of participants. As mentioned above, we did not assign our participants to each group randomly, but rather by the class they were in. The students, however, had been assigned to those classes using a random stratified assignment procedure in the first place.
