2.4 Previous Research on Mandarin Speakers’ Acquisition of English Lexical
2.4.2 Perception Studies
The studies below investigated how English stress was perceived by English and Mandarin speakers. Resynthesized versions of English words or nonsense words were used in their perception tests. Mandarin speakers’ perception and English speakers’
were examined with regard to three acoustic parameters: F0, duration and amplitude.
2.4.2.1 Lai (2008)
Lai (2008) carried out a perception test of stress on one group of English speakers and two groups of Mandarin speakers (beginning and advanced learners of
English). The pronunciation of the nonsense word dada was recorded from a native speaker of English. This word was resynthesized into tokens that varied in the first-to-second-syllable ratio of max F0 and duration. The participants were asked to take a forced-choice test in which they had to identify whether the stress was on the first or the second syllable.
The three groups in the study were found to behave differently in terms of F0 and duration. Both F0 and duration could be a cue for the English speakers to identify stress, but F0 was the major cue they used. Among the Mandarin speakers, the
beginning learners of English perceived stress based on duration but not F0. The advanced learners’ perception was correlated with both duration and F0 cues, and F0 was the main cue.
This study showed the effects of proficiency (i.e., the difference in performance between the beginning and advanced English learners), which is an issue that other studies did not deal with.
2.4.2.2 Wang (2008)
Wang (2008) looked into a group of English speakers and a group of Mandarin speakers’ perception of the nonsense words tetsep, ruzdit and latmab.6 The
6 These nonsense words were originally spelled in IPA by the author as: tɛt.sɛp, nɪz.dɪt and læt.mæb.
pronunciations of the three words were recorded from a native speaker of English.
The recoding was manipulated to have varying F0s, durations and amplitudes. The participants were asked to take a forced-choice test in which they had to decide if the stress is on the first or second syllable.
It was found that F0, duration and amplitudes were all crucial in English
speakers’ recognition of stress. On the other hand, Mandarin speakers relied solely on F0 to perceive stress. In addition, Mandarin speakers were way more sensitive to F0 changes than English speakers.
The author explained the Mandarin speakers’ performance with L1 influence.
The Mandarin speakers perceived English stress in the way they would perceive Mandarin tones: When perceiving Mandarin tones, they would rely entirely on F0, and they transferred this reliance into English to perceive stress.
2.4.2.3 Zhang & Francis (2010)
Zhang & Francis (2010) included one English-speaker group and one
Mandarin-speaker group in their perception study. The noun-verb word pair DEsert vs.
deSERT was recorded from an English speaker, and the words were resynthesized into
tokens that differed in F0, duration and amplitude as the stimuli in the study. The participants participated in a forced-choice test where they had to decide whether thetoken they heard was a noun (with the stress on the first syllable) or a verb (with the stress on the second syllable).
It was found that the effect of F0 was stronger on the Mandarin speakers than the English speakers. The authors contributed the Mandarin speakers’ heavier reliance on F0 to the influence of Mandarin tones because F0 is the crucial cue to differentiate the four tones in Mandarin.
2.4.2.4 Ou (2010)
Ou (2010) worked on Mandarin speakers’ perception of stress patterns elicited in an affirmative statement and in a yes-no question. The participants were asked to take a forced-choice test in which they had to decide whether the disyllabic nonsense word they heard was a noun or a verb. The nonsense word stimuli (FERcept vs. ferCEPT) were taken from the end of an affirmative statement, which was a falling intonation pattern. In this pattern, the stressed syllable in the target word was signaled by a higher F0. The nonsense word stimuli (FERcept vs. ferCEPT) were also taken from the end of a yes/no question, in which a trochaic word would have a high rising F0 pattern in the second syllable, while an iambic word would have a low rising F0 pattern in the second syllable. In the iambic and trochaic word forms taken from the yes/no question, the F0 of the second syllable is generally higher than the first;
therefore, the feature that differentiated the two was the second syllable’s starting point of the rising F0 (high rising vs. low rising).
It was found that, when hearing the trochaic word taken from the yes/no question, some Mandarin speakers were misled by the relatively higher F0 in the second
syllable and recognized the word as iambic. L1 influence was attributed as a reason for the Mandarin speakers’ heavy reliance on F0 cue in the test. Although the current study is not going to work on the effect of context (e.g., affirmative statement vs.
yes/no question) on stress perception, Ou’s (2010) finding can be used as a reference for the general tendency that Mandarin speakers’ stress perception is prone to L1 influence.
2.4.2.5 Chrabaszcz et al. (2014)
Chrabaszcz et al. (2014) investigated a group of Mandarin speakers’ and a group of English speakers’ stress perception of the nonsense word maba. An English speaker pronounced the word, and it was resynthesized into tokens varying in F0, duration, and amplitude. A forced-choice test was carried out to examine whether the
participants recognized the stress in the first or second syllable in each token.
Based on the participants’ responses, each language group’s weighting of the acoustic parameters was calculated. The authors were expecting a difference between
the Mandarin speakers’ and the English speakers’ weighting. However, it turned out that the two groups had the same weighting: Pitch was more important than amplitude, which was more important than duration. The authors concluded that despite the difference between the two languages (i.e., tonal system vs. stress system), it is still possible for Mandarin speakers to achieve native-like perception of English stress.
2.4.2.5 Summary
To conclude from the perception studies above, the most evident difference between the English and Mandarin speakers’ stress perception is in F0, and most of the studies associated this phenomenon with the influence from Mandarin tones.