Perception of English Phonemes by Chinese College Students

Abstract

To explore how L2 listening competence, phoneme category and word frequency influence English phoneme perception of Chinese learners, the current research carried out a comprehensive study of phoneme perception by means of received pronunciation (RP) English phonemic contrasts in minimal pairs. 92 freshmen were divided into three groups, and received all tasks at two different word frequency levels. We found high-proficiency group (HPG) outperformed both low-proficiency group (LPG) and middle-proficiency group (MPG) in terms of accuracy (ACC), implying that HPG tended to apply both bottom-up process and top-down process in phonemic perception but LPG and MPG were prone to adopt just bottom-up process. No significant main effect of group concerning response time (RT) was found, which might be ascribed to human’s physiological similarity in sound perception. Vowels were perceived both faster and more accurately than consonants, which may be caused by sudden decrease/increase or “zero point” in frequency of consonants, or a larger acoustic power of vowels. Although no significant perception difference between high-frequency words (HFW) and low-frequency words (LFW) was found for all the interested contrasts, there was interaction between phoneme category and word frequency in terms of ACC and RT, suggesting word frequency effect on L2 phoneme perception. More specifically, Chinese students’ perception of diphthongs was better than that of monophthongs; high vowels were perceived more accurately than low vowels. As for consonants, liquids, glides and stops were better discerned than affricatives, fricatives and nasals.