The examination of acoustic feature of English obstruent coda by Mandarin and Cantonese speakers

Abstract

Mandarin and Cantonese, though are both Chinese, exhibit differences in L2 English pronunciation, especially in obstruent codas. For the reason that only nasals -n, -m and -ng can be found at coda in Mandarin whereas apart from nasals, unreleased consonants -p -t and -k exits as well in Cantonese, it is reasonable to believe that L1 transfer makes influences on modifying codas for L2 learners. This present study aims at comparing the strategies used by Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in coda modification and resyllabification. By embedding the stimuli in a natural conversation, room-cleaning task, data are elicited and analyzed by Praat. Results indicates that up to 93% of codas are released by Mandarin speakers and 41% of those are unreleased by Cantonese speakers. Further, instead of epenthesizing vocalic elements, Mandarin speakers are found to strongly aspirate the codas with 58%, which contradicts most of the previous studies claiming that epenthesis is the main modification used among Mandarin L2 learners.