The perception of consonants by non-native speakers : a comparison of Cantonese- and Mandarin-L1 speakers' perception of English /[theta], [eth] /

Abstract

 This paper examines how native speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin perceive English interdental fricatives [θ] and [ð]. In an AX discrimination task, 23 Cantonese speakers and 19 Mandarin speakers discriminated the English speech sounds [θ], [ð], [f], [v], [s], [z], [th] and [d] in syllables with consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant structures. Syllables with the same structure and the same vowel but different or the same consonants were presented in pairs in each trial. Logistic mixed-effect regression analyses were performed to compare the performance of Cantonese- and Mandarin-L1 listeners on the perception of different sound pairs in the two syllable structures. The results showed that the extent of difficulty in perceiving [θ] and [ð] differed between Cantonese and Mandarin speakers, and their perceptual assimilation patterns were not identical. Additionally, accuracy rates and assimilation patterns showed positional asymmetry, indicating the influence of consonant position within the syllable on its perception. Since Mandarin and Cantonese are quite different in terms of their phonetic and phonological characteristics, comparing the different behaviors of the two groups of native speakers in L2 sound perception can provide better understanding as to what factors affect L2 phonological acquisition. It is possible that the difference in phonetic inventories of Mandarin and Cantonese leads to the phenomenon that their native speakers attend to different aspects of acoustic properties of the English interdental fricatives during perception.