Mapping vowels from American English to Taiwanese Mandarin: A perceptual study

Abstract

It has been noted that vowel backness is largely preserved in English-to-Mandarin loanwords, but not vowel height. This asymmetry contradicts the native phonological patterns. The aim of this study is to re-examine this issue from an experimental perspective. Ten Taiwanese Mandarin (TM) speakers (aged 23–30) participated in this experiment. English Stimuli consisted in /CVmi/ sequences with C corresponding to one of the three consonants {b, d, g} and with V to one of the four vowels {ɛ, ɔ, æ, ɚ}. Mandarin stimuli also consisted in /CVmi/ sequences with C corresponding to one of the three consonants {p, t, k} and with V to one of the following vowels {i, a, u, ei, ie, au, ou, uo}. The participants were asked to rate similarity between American English and TM vowels (on scale 1–7). Our results partially support the generalizations in loanword adaptation, namely that TM speakers tend to map English [æ] onto Mandarin [ei], rather than [a], while [ɔ] is mapped to [ou/uo], [ɛ] to [ei], and [ɚ] to [ɣ]. We further measured the perceptual distance between English and Mandarin vowels by means of Euclidean distance. Given the assumption that smaller acoustic distance means greater perceptual similarity, it turned out that only this pair (English [ɚ] and Mandarin [ɣ]) can be explained away. It is thus concluded that loanword adaptation is not entirely based on raw acoustic signals. Phonological features and phonotactics also play a significant role.