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Preliminary results on the acquisition of Portuguese voicing assimilation in coda fricative by Chinese learners
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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
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.
Description
Keywords
Second language acquisition Portuguese as a foreign language phonology Fricative voicing assimilation Chinese learners
Citation
Wang, X., Castelo, A., & Zhou, C. (2023). Preliminary results on the acquisition of Portuguese voicing assimilation in coda fricative by Chinese learners. L2 Portuguese @ Lancaster (L2P@L 2023) (Lancaster University, Reino Unido, 13-14/07/2023).