Production of English vowels by speakers of Mandarin Chinese with prolonged exposure to English

Abstract

Previous studies of non-native production of English vowels have demonstrated that a native-like attainment of certain distinctions is not guaranteed for all speakers, despite prolonged exposure to the target (e.g., Munro et al. 1996, Flege et al. 1997). The current study examines the applicability of this finding to a group of non-native speakers from the same L1 background (Mandarin Chinese) who are all long-term residents in the USA (7 years minimum) and adult arrivals (> age 18). These non-native speakers (N=36) and a control group of native speakers (N=22) were recorded reading two sets of materials: the Stella paragraph (Weinberg 2012) and five sentences from Flege et al. (1999). Vowel formant measurements were extracted for all tokens from the following three pairs of vowels: [i] ~ [ɪ], [e] ~ [ɛ], and [a] ~ [ʌ]. Euclidean distances between the z-normalized (F1, F2) mean values for the two vowels in each pair for each speaker show that the non-native speakers produce each of the three pairs significantly less distinctly than the native speakers. This finding corroborates previous similar findings and suggests that a speaker's L1 continues to have a strong influence on vowel production, despite long-term exposure to the target.