The Influence of Dialect on the Perception and Production of Lax-Tense Vowel Distinction in English Learning

Abstract

This acoustic experimental study investigates the influence of dialectal background on the perception and production of lax-tense vowel distinction in English learning from the theoretical standpoint of language transfer. Previous studies usually regard the first language as a source of transfer, with few considering the influence of dialect in the process of transfer, while this study has taken account of participants’ dialects and biological genders and look at whether and how Chinese dialectal knowledge is transferred in English learning. A perception and a production experiment are conducted with two groups of participants -- Cantonese Chinese speakers and Mandarin Chinese speakers -- to respectively analyze their perception and production strategy for English lax-tense vowel pairs [I]/[i:] and [ʊ]/[u:]. The study finds out that dialect and gender cause statistically significant difference. The result shows that Cantonese speakers can effectively leverage spectral cues to differentiate English tense vowels from lax vowels, while Mandarin speakers rely heavily on durational cues. The two lingual groups have disparate production result, but no one group is overall better than the other in producing lax-tense vowels. Mandarin and Cantonese participants only differ in the F2 of the [u:] production. Moreover, when gender is considered, Mandarin females can produce native-like [ʊ]; Cantonese males and females can produce native-like [I], Cantonese females native-like [i:] and Cantonese males native-like [u:]. This study confirms that dialect should be considered in transfer study, and further points out that both dialect and gender are significant variables of the transfer mechanism in foreign language acquisition.