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- Preliminary results on the acquisition of Portuguese voicing assimilation in coda fricative by Chinese learnersPublication . Wang, Xinyan; Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, ChaoIn 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.
- A aquisição das consoantes laterais do português europeu por aprendentes chinesesPublication . Zhou, Chao; Freitas, Maria João; Castelo, AdelinaThe present study examined the production of European Portuguese (EP) lateral consonants by 14 Chinese learners, through a picture naming task eliciting the target segments in all possible syllable and word-level positions. Our results illustrate that /l/ is stable in singletons (100% target-like) due to the positive transfer from Mandarin Chinese. However, it is very often vocalized in codas (only 16.7% target-like production, [ɫ]), which might be attributed to a phonetically based tendency (Graham, 2017; Johnson & Britain, 2007). The high accuracy (97% target-like) of /l/ in onset clusters, an absent structure in the L1, can be the result of the heterosyllabic nature of EP obstruent-liquid sequences (Veloso, 2006) or of the association of two segments to a single skeletal position, which was also argued as an intermediate stage in EP L1 acquisition (Freitas, 2003)./ʎ/ is still in acquisition (52.4% target-like), and is often produced as an L1 category [lj], due to acoustic and articulatory similarity.
- Acquisition of Portuguese mid vowels by Chinese Mandarin native speakers: some data on perceptionPublication . Castelo, Adelina; Zhou, Chao; Amorim, ClaraPrior 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.