A Study on Fricatives and Affricates Produced by Chinese English Learners

Abstract

The resemblance between equivalent phonemes in Mandarin and English may be crucial for Chinese English learners. Three pairs of comparable fricative and affricates exit in the two languages. Prior research on fricatives and affricatives has tended to ignore the outputs of second language learners and instead concentrated on those of monolingual speakers. As a result, the research question of the current paper is to study fricatives and affricates produced by Chinese English learners. After extracting the main acoustic features of fricatives and affricates that occurred in both English and Mandarin produced by Chinese English learners, one-way ANOVA tests are used to examine the significance. Multidimensional Euclidean distance is used to compare the similarity between each pair of comparable phonemes. The results of these tests led to the conclusion that Mandarin has a detrimental impact on English when learning a second language. What is also worth noticing is that gender may work in the acquisition process, which needs further research to verify.