Indexical perception in Chinese: The influence of first‐language (L1) Taiwanese on second‐language (L2) Mandarin.

Abstract

A pilot study on indexical perception in Chinese hypothesized that L1 Taiwanese speakers’ L2 Mandarin production could be detected as having a nonnative accent. If the nonnative accent was detectable, what phonetic properties (the phonetics of consonants or vowels, or the prosody) did L1 Taiwanese speakers’ Mandarin exhibit such that these attributes entailed indexical information? Additionally, the study argued that L1 Mandarin speakers would show higher sensitivity to the nonnative accent than L1 Taiwanese speakers. The results have shown that only in sentence production, the sentences being either low‐pass filtered or unfiltered, could the L1 Taiwanese talkers be possibly indexed correctly. It was also found that the listeners perceived more accurately when they encountered retroflex stimuli in monosyllabic word condition. Based on these findings, it was concluded that the prosody and the retroflex consonants seemed to reveal much of the talker’s L1 information. However, concerning the hypothesis that L1 Mandarin speakers were more sensitive to the nonnative accent, the results did not support this. The findings in this pilot study are preliminary, given the fact that the corpus was small. A bigger‐scale study is being carried out to gain more insights into indexical perception in Chinese.