Investigation of possible Near-merger in Mandarin nasal codas

Abstract

The two codas /n/ and /ŋ/ in Mandarin are known to undergo merger in production of speakers from various dialect groups such as Shanghai Mandarin (Faytak et al., 2020) and Taiwan Mandarin (Chiu et al., 2019). A study by Faytak et al. (2020) revealed that even for Beijing Mandarin speakers, who do not show such a merger in production, they still could not distinguish /n/ and /ŋ/ in perception. This indicates a possible instance of near merger in Standard Mandarin, meaning speakers can distinguish between two sounds in production but not in perception (Labov et al., 1991). This study aims to validate whether Mandarin nasal codas demonstrate patterns of near merger with consideration of potential influence by dialect groups. Both speakers of Beijing Mandarin and speakers of Shanghai Mandarin will be recruited. This study consists of one production section where subjects produce minimal pairs in Mandarin that only differ in coda position, and a perception task involving a phoneme categorization task and a goodness rating task of various productions of /n/ and /ŋ/. The hypothesis is that listeners’ perceptual performance will correlate with their production pattern (e.g., Fridland and Kendall, 2012). However, if this study validates near merger in Mandarin coda nasals, this will be the first case of a non-tonal near merger in Mandarin. If otherwise, this study still sheds light on how speakers from various Chinese dialect groups might exhibit different cue-weighting strategies.