Asymmetry in Mandarin affricate perception by learners of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Six Mandarin affricates (i.e., zh, ch, z[ts], c[ts^h], j, q), which are not universally present in other languages, have been extensively challenging for learners of Mandarin Chinese. In the current study, perception of these affricates was investigated via an experiment in which native speakers of Malay and of Burmese identified Mandarin affricate pairs varying across place of articulation and manner of articulation. The results showed that language experience was significant for all Mandarin affricate pairs. Among the Mandarin affricate pairs, learners of Mandarin Chinese were most confused about the aspirated affricates, especially the dental-retroflex contrast. Dentalisation was the dominant direction of Mandarin affricate merger, especially in the -[ts] and -[ts^h] pairs. These findings in the perception experiment of Mandarin affricates were somewhat in disagreement with previous studies, but supported some theories developed from European languages. To draw on the facts from other languages (i.e., Polish), the researcher argued that L1-L2 segment inventories alone may not fully account for the current findings and suggested one Interactive Model for interpreting the perceptual asymmetry in Mandarin affricates.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to the participants in the experiments. The author would also like to express the deepest and sincerest gratitude to Dr. Raung-fu Chang, a visiting professor in University of Singapore, for his insightful guidance and support during this study. Special thanks go to the reviewers and editors for their comments and valuable suggestions for this paper.

Notes

¹The official pinyin transcription is used (with IPA symbols in brackets where they differ) (Li, 1999; Svantesson, 1986).

²The current perceptual stimuli were natural speech, instead of synthetic tokens or tape-spliced segments.

³The target segment in each minimal pair shared the same tone, that is, Tone 55.

⁴Based on the reviewers’ valuable suggestions, multi-talker stimuli and two kinds of trials (i.e. A-A or A-B/B-A) were adopted in the perceptual experiment. Great thanks were given to the reviewers.

⁵In the current investigation, the researcher tried to involve the high-frequency phrases for confusion tended to occur on the words of low frequency. But, words with such Mandarin affricates as [ts^h] in Tone 55 were few. Left without too many choices, the researcher had to include some phrases which might not be used so frequently in daily Mandarin conversation.

⁶These CSL learners self-reported that they had no difficulty reading these Chinese characters.

⁷A goodness rating was included in the current investigation and this goodness rating followed one reviewer's suggestion that the labels ‘new’ and ‘similar’ could be assigned only after evaluating listeners’ judgements of similarity. Great thanks were given to him.

⁸In each group, the patterns of errors made in the first character were similar to those in the second character. For convenience in discussion and for display of the general pattern, these errors were added up and taken into consideration in Figure 1.

⁹The discussion on affricate merger followed the pattern in Aoyama (2003), who focused on perception of English nasals by Korean and Japanese speakers.

¹⁰Post-alveolar affricates in Polish are classified as retroflexes, and pre-palatal is also referred to as alveo-palatal in Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996).