Comparing fundamental frequency of German vowels produced by German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners.

Yingming Gao,Hongwei Ding,Peter Birkholz,Yi Lin

doi:10.1121/10.0005593

Yingming Gao, Hongwei Ding + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0005593

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Abstract

This study compared the f0 of 14 German vowels in monosyllabic words (/dVt/) embedded in carrier sentences produced by 30 native speakers and 30 Mandarin Chinese learners. Appropriate techniques were employed to robustly measure f0 values and reliably analyze f0 profiles. The results showed that Mandarin learners produced the vowels bearing sentence stress with significantly larger f0 ranges and steeper f0 slopes but comparable f0 mean and maximum in comparison to German natives. Moreover, lax vowels produced by both groups demonstrated narrower ranges with faster f0 changes than tense vowels, which was stronger for Mandarin learners.

Highlights

Compared with the extensive studies on Mandarin learners speaking English (Chen et al, 2001a; Jin and Liu, 2013; Yuan and Liberman, 2014), acoustic analyses of their production of German as a second language (L2) are still limited
Regarding the interaction between the intrinsic f0 and the prosodic environment, we predicted that Mandarin Chinese learners might have some difficulties in using f0 properly when they speak the non-tone language German. To address this specific issue, the current study aims to compare the f0 profiles of German vowels produced by German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners with a particular interest in the tense-lax contrast under sentence stress
A series of linear mixed-effects (LME) models were run in MATLAB (MathWorks, 2019), where SpeakerGroup, Gender, VowelIdentity, or Tenseness and their interactions were treated as fixed effects and Subject as a random effect for intercept, while the acoustic parameters (f0 mean, maximum, range, or slope) were the dependent variables

Summary

Introduction

Compared with the extensive studies on Mandarin learners speaking English (Chen et al, 2001a; Jin and Liu, 2013; Yuan and Liberman, 2014), acoustic analyses of their production of German as a second language (L2) are still limited. The phonetic-acoustic differences of the German tense-lax opposition in production may manifest through changes in vowel formants, duration, and f0 (Schneeberg and Schlu€ßler, 2006). The former two aspects have been compared between German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners (Gao et al, 2020), while the last factor (f0 difference) remains to be investigated. Though previous studies have revealed that L2 German produced by Mandarin learners has higher f0 mean and larger f0 range on both sentence and phoneme levels compared with that produced by German natives (Ding et al, 2006), they have rarely concerned the f0 profiles associated with the tense-lax vowel contrast. The tense-lax contrast of vowels should be evident in formants and duration, and in f0

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