Comparing Articulatory Consistency Between Native and Second Language Speakers

Abstract

This paper presents a comparison between the articulatory configurations of native English speakers and native Mandarin speakers speaking English. Data is taken from the Marquette Electromagnetic Articulography corpus of Mandarin Accented English (EMA-MAE), which includes 20 native English and 19 native Mandarin speakers, focusing on vowel trajectories from isolated word data. A comparison is made between English vowels that have corresponding vowels in Mandarin, versus those that do not, with results supporting the idea that variability of articulator positioning in L2 speakers is larger for vowels that are unique to English than for those that have corresponding vowels in the native language.