Training Chinese dialect listeners to perceive English /n/ and /l/

Abstract

Dialects and Mandarin subdialects in certain areas of southern China do not distinguish between /n/ and /l/. Native speakers of these dialects usually have difficulty distinguishing these two sounds when learning English, even after years of experience with the language. The goal of the present research is to develop a set of procedures that would be effective in training these speakers to learn this non-native speech contrast in English. Forty listeners were recruited from 3 dialect areas (6 Gan, 11 Jianghuai, and 23 Xinan). Listeners were instructed to identify the initial consonant in an English word spoken by 3 native speakers of American English. A pre- and a post-test design were used to assess the effect of a 4-day training. A generalization test containing the same stimuli spoken by 2 new talkers was also carried out on the same day of the post-test. Overall, subjects’ performance improved significantly from the pre-test to the post-test and there was no significant group difference. Additionally, there was no significant difference between their performance of /n/ and /l/ either before or after training. Vowel contexts and syllable structures are also found to have affected listeners’ perception in the post-test.