Acquiring Italian stop consonants: A challenge for Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners

Abstract

The acquisition of Italian stop consonants by Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners has hardly been investigated. This study was designed to fill this gap. To investigate Chinese learners’ acquisition patterns of Italian voiced and voiceless stops, a perception experiment and a production experiment were conducted. Twenty Mandarin Chinese-speaking undergraduate students majoring in Italian, five native Italian and five native Mandarin speakers served as participants in the perception experiment; and an equal number of participants with the same language backgrounds served as participants in the production experiment. In the perception experiment, the participants had to identify the stimuli in three continua (i.e. bilabial, alveolar and velar) where voice onset time (VOT) values ranged from −50 ms to 90 ms in 10 ms steps. In the production experiment, data were collected from a reading task in which the participants were asked to read the target words with word-initial stops in carrier-sentences; the VOT and closure durations were measured. The results show that, in perception, Chinese learners have difficulty differentiating between Italian voiced and voiceless stops; in production, Italian voiced rather than voiceless stops represent a challenge for Chinese learners. The results are in line with the predictions made by the Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2 (PAM-L2) and the Speech Learning Model (SLM), as well as with most other studies focusing on the acquisition of stops of ‘true-voice languages’ by Chinese learners.