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  • Acquisition of Portuguese mid vowels by Chinese Mandarin native speakers: some data on perception
    Publication . Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, Chao; Amorim, Clara
    Prior research reveals that, when acquiring European Portuguese (EP), L1-Mandarin learners with beginning ([1]) and more advanced proficiency levels ([2]) neutralise the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/ to the low vowel in their L2-Portuguese production. Given that major L2 speech learning models ([3], [4], [5]) assume a tight link between L2 speech perception and production, we speculate that the observed production difficulty can be ascribed to misperception: the two target vowels are perceptually assimilated to an L1 category. In this work, we explicitly tested this perception-based account by assessing how L1-Mandarin learners perceptually categorise EP /e/ and /ɛ/. 70 L1-Mandarin learners, whose Portuguese proficiency level was measured by LextPT ([6]), performed a forced-choice identification task. The test stimuli are 36 disyllabic paroxytone pseudowords with target vowels always in stressed position (12 CVCV items × 3 talkers). The perceptual results show that L1-Mandarin learners fail to discriminate between the two EP vowels, as shown in Figure 1. In stark contrast to previous production studies ([1], [2]), where the vowel distinction is somehow preserved (otherwise the confusability would have been bidirectional as well), the current results suggest that the two speech modalities may not develop in tandem in L2 speech learning. Moreover, a mixed-effects logistic regression does not find an effect of L2 proficiency on learners’ perceptual performance. No evidence thus indicates that the observed perceptual difficulty will be mitigated with an increase in L2-Portuguese proficiency.
    2023-07-13Conference object Restricted access Show more
  • Preliminary results on the acquisition of Portuguese voicing assimilation in coda fricative by Chinese learners
    Publication . Wang, Xinyan; Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, Chao
    In the phonological system of European Portuguese (EP), there is a process of voicing assimilation in the fricative in Coda position, which is produced as [ʒ] before a voiced consonant and as [ʃ] before a voiceless consonant ([1]). There are already studies on the segmental acquisition of fricatives among the native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (MC) who learn Portuguese as a second language (L2) (e.g. [2]). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study on the acquisition of this EP assimilation process of among MC native speakers. Consequently, evaluating the process application in the production of these learners can contribute to a better understanding of their phonological acquisition in EP and to a reflection on different models of phonology acquisition of an L2 (e.g. [3], [4]). Therefore, the present work aims to observe the voicing specification in the fricative in Coda position, in controlled speech produced by MC native speakers who are learners of EP. Ten EP native speakers and thirty Chinese learners of EP participated in a reading task. The stimuli consist of 40 pseudowords and 20 distractors. All items were disyllabic words with the format CVC.CV, including five groups of 8 pseudowords each according to the manner of articulation of the second syllable consonant: voiceless fricative, voiced fricative, voiceless oral stop, voiced oral stop, nasal stop. Participants were recorded reading each item within a carrier the sentence “Digo XX novamente.” (“I say XX again.”). The results show that, as expected, the native speakers applied voicing assimilation systematically; by contrast, the Chinese learners predominantly produced voiceless fricatives, regardless of the voicing of the following consonant. There might be an effect of the manner of the following consonant, as many learners use almost exclusively the voiceless consonant in all contexts while some tend to employ the voiced one only before a nasal consonant. These results suggest that the success in learning the fricative voicing ([2]) does not guarantee the acquisition of a phonological process implying such voicing alternation. After a detailed presentation of the results, the implications of these are analyzed in terms of phonological acquisition and didactic implementation.
    2023-07-13Conference object Restricted access Show more