The effect of phonetic similarity on L2 speakers in discerning L1 and L2 consonants

Abstract

This study investigated how L1 and L2 sounds of different degrees of similarity are perceived by L2 speakers. Twenty-six participants were tested with six Mandarin-English C-/i/ syllable pairs varying in degrees of similarity in the initial consonant. Two competing models were examined, the speech learning model (Flege, 1995) and the perceptual assimilation model (Best, 1995). The former proposes that the greater the perceived dissimilarity between an L2 sound and its closest L1 counterpart, the easier it is for L2 speakers to discern the difference, while the latter proposes that L2-to-L1 assimilation corresponds to their articulatory distance. As for two L2 sounds corresponding to the same L1 target, perceptual performance may still differ depending on how similar the L2 sounds are to the target. Results showed that perceptual performance was independent of L2 proficiency. The SLM is supported in that the accuracy for discerning individual consonants of ‘‘dissimilar’’ pairs was higher than that for ‘‘similar’’ pairs, which in turn was higher than that for ‘‘identical’’ pairs. However, the accuracy for discerning ‘‘identical’’ pairs was still significantly higher than the chance level, indicating that L2 speakers are still able to tell the difference, which can be better explained by the PAM.