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Acquisition of Portuguese mid vowels by Chinese Mandarin native speakers: some data on perception
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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
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.
Description
Keywords
Second language acquisition Portuguese as a foreign language Phonology Vowels Chinese learners
Citation
Castelo, A., Zhou, C., & Amorim, C. (2023). Acquisition of Portuguese mid vowels by Chinese Mandarin native speakers: some data on perception. L2 Portuguese @ Lancaster (L2P@L 2023) (Lancaster University, Reino Unido, 13-14/07/2023).