An investigation into the perception (and production) of English word-initial consonants by native speakers of Cantonese

Abstract

of thesis entitled An investigation into the perception (and production) of English word-initial consonants by native speakers of Cantonese submitted by Chan Pik Ha for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong September, 1999 With the urge to develop their professionalism, second language (L2) teachers and educators are expanding their research and teaching diversity. However, phonology has been an area of general neglect in both the aspects of classroom practice and research because of the previous limited success. A closer look into the current phonology programs reveals that the majority of L2 teachers approach the teaching from a restricted perspective that focuses mainly on the place and manner of sound production. This ignores other levels of speech processing, thus contributing to the learners' achievement being limited. This dissertation attempts to explore a higher level of speech processing, the perceptual level, and its relationship with the production of the same sound. The aim of the study is three-fold (i) to explore the perception and perceptual strategies of Cantonese speakers with different production performance on the English word-initial consonants /v, 0, 5, z, r/, (ii) to study the relationship between perception and production, and (iii) to suggest implications for L2 speech teaching. Local Cantonese subjects, aged between 21 and 29 and of similar English experience and proficiency, were assigned to two groups. The subjects in one group (Group A) were those who mispronounced consistently the English word-initial consonants /v, 0, 5, z, r/ as [w, f, d, s, w] respectively while the other group (Group B) consistently produced the same sounds correctly. These subjects were involved individually in a forced-choice phonemic perception test of the contrast-pairs of/v-w/, /0-f7, /6-dI, lz-sl and /r-w/. Results indicate a significantly poorer perceptual performance of Group A as compared to Group B which support the perceptual based hypothesis of speech accuracy. The difference is thought to be due to the use of different perceptual strategies by the two groups. This dissertation also considers possible implications for the difference between LI and L2 speech learning, L2 speech pedagogy and future research directions.