The acquisition of Taiwan Mandarin vowels by native American English speakers

Abstract

Previous work on the production of English and French phones by native American English speakers indicated that equivalence classification prevent L2 learners from approximating L2 phonetic norms of similar phones and that learning French would not affect English speakers’ production of L1 similar phone /u/ (Flege, 1987). In this study, there were five subjects, including 2 advanced native American English learners of Taiwan Mandarin, 2 basic native American English learners of Taiwan Mandarin, and 1 monolingual Taiwan Mandarin speaker. The corpus were 12 English words ‘‘heed, who’d, hod; leak, Luke, lock; beat, suit, bot; peat, suit, pot,’’ and 12 Mandarin words [i,u, a; li, lu, la; pi, pu, pa; phi, phu, pha]. Both advanced and basic learners’ production of English and Mandarin words and monolingual Taiwan Mandarin speaker’s production of Mandarin words were directly recorded onto a PC. Vowel formants were taken from spectrograms generated by Praat. Preliminary results showed the vowel space of advanced learners between Taiwan Mandarin [i] and [u] was larger than that of basic learners, and closer to the Taiwan Mandarin norms. Besides, the vowel space between English [i] and [u] by basic learners was dramatically smaller than that of American English norms.