CVC syllables for investigating the phonetic sensitivity of Mandarin and English speakers

Abstract

Although many individual speech contrasts pairs have been studied within the cross-language literature, no one has created a comprehensive and systematic set of such stimuli. This article justifies and details an extensive set of contrast pairs for Mandarin Chinese and American English. The stimuli consist of 180 pairs of CVC syllables recorded in two tokens each (720 syllables total). Between each CVC pair, two of the segments are identical, whereas the third differs in that a segment drawn from a "native" phonetic category (either Mandarin, English, or both) is partnered with a segment drawn from a "foreign" phonetic category (nonnative to Mandarin, English, or both). Each contrast pair differs by a minimal phonetic amount and constitutes a meaningful contrast among the world's languages (as cataloged in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database of 451 languages). The entire collection of phonetic differences envelops Mandarin and English phonetic spaces and generates a range of phonetic discriminability. Contrastive segments are balanced through all possible syllable positions, with noncontrastive segments being filled in with other "foreign" segments. Although intended to measure phonetic perceptual sensitivity among adult speakers of the two languages, these stimuli are offered here to all for similar or for altogether unrelated investigations.In an ongoing series of investigations into individual differences in second language acquisition of speech sounds, I have developed a set stimuli used to test listener aptitude for detecting small phonetic differences within their first language (L1) and second language (L2) categories. Tasks measuring differential listener sensitivity are compared with measures of idiosyncratic productive accent, in an attempt t? identify one or more cognitive correlate(s) of spoken accent. The stimulus set, composed entirely of CVC syllables, was designed to assess L2 speakers of American English with Mandarin Chinese as their L 1 . The segments that compose each CVC are compiled from speech contrasts that are nonnative to the phonetic categories of these two languages and that mark meaningful distinctions among a substantial fraction of the world's languages, as cataloged within the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database of 451 languages (UPSID451; Maddieson & Precoda, 1990). The location of the paired contrasting segment is rotated through syllable positions; the corpus of 180 pairs, with two tokens recorded for each (a total of 720 CVCs), is subdivided by target language(s). The impetus for this publication is to substantiate these stimuli and to make them available with the prospect of life in other investigations. Thus, first, the motivation for these stimuli will be provided, along with a discussion of their rationalization based on the current related L2 speech framework. This is then followed by a description of the CVC pairs, including how they were generated. Finally, this article concludes with a series of suggestions of other ways that these stimuli might b...

The Contributions of Crosslinguistic Influence and Individual Differences to Nonnative Speech Perception

“…In regard to L2 perception specifically, IDs may reflect a construct that has been called phonetic sensitivity in the L2 speech literature (e.g., Kwon 2013;Munro 2008). Note that it is phonetic, as opposed to psychoacoustic, sensitivity that is of interest here due to the neurolinguistic evidence of a "speech-specific origin of individual variability in L2 phonetic mastery" (Díaz et al 2008, p. 16083).…”