The study compared the oral stops produced by the Chinese learners of English with those of the American native speakers. We employed the original English TIMIT, the global Chinese TIMIT, and the L2 English TIMIT by Chinese speakers to represent the target language, source language and interlanguage. Because of the quantity and diversity of these databases, this study only selected part of the speech in which the texts were read by most American speakers and Chinese speakers for analysis. Regarding the unbalanced occurrences of stop releases, the mixed effects model was used for the statistics of the release duration comparison between the native and L2 speakers. The results showed that the Chinese speakers produced significantly longer aspirated stops than the American speakers did. A further investigation indicated that the Chinese speakers, unlike the American natives, released the final stop consonant and sometimes with an extra vowel at the end. The prolonged word final stops and inserted schwas become distinguished prosodic features of Chinese speakers' English interlanguage. Different features of stops and new allophonic rules in English prove to be difficult for Chinese learners in English acquisition. The findings can present some pedagogical implications in L2 speech learning.
Although the TIMIT acoustic-phonetic dataset ([1], [2]) was created three decades ago, it remains in wide use, with more than 20000 Google Scholar references, and more than 1000 since 2017. Despite TIMIT's antiquity and relatively small size, inspection of these references shows that it is still used in many research areas: speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech synthesis, speech coding, speech enhancement, voice activity detection, speech perception, overlap detection and source separation, diagnosis of speech and language disorders, and linguistic phonetics, among others. Nevertheless, comparable datasets are not available even for other widely-studied languages, much less for underdocumented languages and varieties. Therefore, we have developed a method for creating TIMIT-like datasets in new languages with modest effort and cost, and we have applied this method in standard Thai, standard Mandarin Chinese, English from Chinese L2 learners, the Guanzhong dialect of Mandarin Chinese, and the Ga language of West Africa. Other collections are planned or underway. The resulting datasets will be published through the LDC, along with instructions and open-source tools for replicating this method in other languages, covering the steps of sentence selection and assignment to speakers, speaker recruiting and recording, proof-listening, and forced alignment.
In the Chengdu Dialect of Mandarin, the /(V)an/ rime words have been described to have undergone a nasal loss process in the last decades. However, no acoustical or physiological evidence has been provided so far. In this study, we investigate this sound change process by directly looking at the velum gesture in the target segments from 4 Chengdu speakers. By means of real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rt-MRI), the velum opening signal was captured along with synchronized and noise suppressed audio. The maximum degree of velum opening was compared between tautosyllabic and heterosyllabic VN sequences for different vowels (N = /n, ŋ/). Nasal consonant loss was most evident for tautosyllabic /(V)an/ rime words. This sound change, together with the observed diachronic vowel raising in /(V)an/ rimes, is compatible with other research showing a preference for low vowel raising before nasal consonants. This phonetically motivated oral vowel, which is a consequence of nasal coda loss and vowel raising, would form a new phonological contrast in this dialect e.g., from /pa, pan/ to /pa, pɛ/.
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