Perceptual Processing of Mandarin Nasals by L1 and L2 Mandarin Speakers

Abstract

Nasals are cross-linguistically susceptible to change, especially in the syllable final position. Acoustic reports on Mandarin nasal production have recently shown that the syllable-final distinction is frequently dropped. Few studies, however, have addressed the issue of perceptual processing in Mandarin nasals for L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The current paper addressed to what extent and in what directions L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin differed in perceiving Mandarin nasals. Possible variables, including the linguistic backgrounds (i.e. L1 vs. L2 speakers of Mandarin Chinese), the vocalic contexts (i.e. [i, ə, a, y, ua, uə, ia]) and the phonetic settings (i.e. syllable-initial vs. syllable-final), were discussed. Asymmetrical findings in the current investigation indicated limitations of speech learning theories developed from European languages in the context of Mandarin nasals. A tri-dimensional model was thus suggested for interpreting the cognitive mechanism in Mandarin nasal perception.

Consciousness, brain, neuroplasticity

“…One possibility suggested in the literature is that while in English the observer is always facing the future, in Mandarin the observer may sometimes be facing the past. For example, Lai (2002) and Ahrens and Huang (2002) suggest that in the time-moving scenario in Mandarin, the observer is facing the past with time washing over them from behind (in the ego-moving scenario, the observer is still facing the future as in English) (see also Núñez and Sweetser, 2006, for their case in the Aymara language).…”

“…Consider Example 7 in Table 1. The “front year” in Mandarin is “2 years ago.” Some researchers have suggested this as linguistic evidence that the observer is facing the past, such that past events are in front of the observer and future events are behind (Ahrens and Huang, 2002; Lai, 2002; Zhang and Rong, 2007). An alternative analysis is that qian (front) and hou (back) function as adjectives modifying the stream of events in a timeline, implying that the temporal events themselves have a front and back.…”