Abstract
Adult L2 learners have difficulties in perceiving and producing L2 speech sounds. In analyzing learners’ L2 speech learning problems, this study provides research data from a series of studies on L2 speech perception, production, and training. Section 1 investigates how the L1 sound system influences L2 speech perception. A recent study shows that phonetic differences and distances between English and Mandarin consonants predicted the perceptual problems of Mandarin consonants by native English learners of Chinese. Section 2 explores the relationship between L2 speech perception and production and reports a subsequent study on Mandarin consonants that shows English learners of Chinese performed better in perception than production on Mandarin retroflex sounds but vice versa on palatal sounds. The lack of alignment between perception and production suggests the relationship between L2 speech perception and production is not straightforward. In Section 3, two training experiments are reported and compared to explore the effects of phonetic training on the learning of English vowel and Mandarin tone contrasts.
Highlights
There has been a general consensus among researchers over the past two decades that the goal of second language (L2) pronunciation teaching and learning is not to strive for “native-like” productions but to improve intelligibility and comprehensibility for effective communication (CELCE-MURCIA et al, 2010; LEVIS, 2005; MUNRO & DERWING, 1995)
The different outcomes of training for L2 vowel and lexical tone contrasts are not surprizing as Sakai and Moorman’s (2018) meta-analysis of 18 perception training studies concluded that perceptual training only led to a small-sized gains in productions of the target sounds and the production gains are larger on obstruents than on sonorants and vowels
Studies on infant and adult monolingual speakers’ speech perception indicate that infants are language-general perceivers of speech sounds while adult monolingual speakers are language-specific perceivers
Summary
There has been a general consensus among researchers over the past two decades that the goal of second language (L2) pronunciation teaching and learning is not to strive for “native-like” productions but to improve intelligibility and comprehensibility for effective communication (CELCE-MURCIA et al, 2010; LEVIS, 2005; MUNRO & DERWING, 1995). In a recent study on native English learners of Chinese as a Foreign language, (CFL), Wang and Chen (2019) adopted a cross-linguistic direct mapping method to assess the phonetic distances and differences between English and Mandarin consonants. While these sounds were the best categorized by the learners, they are phonetically very different from the L1 categories To assess how these cross-linguistic assimilation patterns influence CFL learners’ perceptual learning of Mandarin consonants, a subsequent experiment on English CFL learners’ identifications of Mandarin consonants was carried out. The two best matching categories, r /ʐ/, and sh /ʂ/, received the highest identification scores for both groups It appears that the perceived phonetic distances between L1 and L2 consonants predicted the CFL learners’ L2 Mandarin consonant perception problems for beginning level learners. One possible explanation for the learners’ difficulties with Mandarin z /ts/ could be it competes with both s /s/ and c /tsh/ for English /s/ sound and the three-to-one assimilation pattern causes confusions
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