The Perception of English Speech Sounds by Cantonese ESL Learners in Hong Kong

Abstract

This article reports on the results of a research study which investigated the perception of English speech sounds by Hong Kong Cantonese English as a second language speakers. A total of 40 university English majors participated in one categorial discrimination task and two second language (L2) minimal pair identification tasks, which aimed at discerning the participants' perception of different English speech sounds. The results show that certain English speech sounds trigger more perception problems than others, but perception problems do not necessarily correspond to documented production difficulties. It is argued that learners' preconception of word pronunciations may be a contributing factor for their perception problems. The position of a sonorant consonant may also play a role in perception, but positional effects do not seem to be as significant in the perception of obstruents as in that of sonorant consonants. It is suggested that remedial teaching on both perception and production should go hand in hand to enhance learners' L2 phonology acquisition.

The perception and production of English speech sounds by Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong

“…The overall accuracy rate was only 66%. /z/ was also 11 The results reported in this article concerning the participants' performance in the seven tasks have also been reported in similar but different forms in Chan (2010Chan ( , 2011Chan ( , 2012.…”

“…It was found that the learners who consistently confused the target consonant pairs (/v, w/, /θ, f/, /ð, d/, /z, s/ and /r, w/) in production also had confusion in perception for the same contrast pairs, and all the target sounds, such as /v, θ, ð, z, r/, were misperceived as exactly the mispronounced versions for the target sounds, namely /w, f, d, s, w/. In another sub-study of the present study, Chan (2011) made different observations in the explanation of Cantonese ESL learners' perception of English speech sounds documented as causing production difficulties. She found that although Cantonese ESL learners encountered difficulties in their perception of speech sounds, the areas of difficulties were not the same as those for production.…”

“…2 All the procedures reported in this article, including the data collection tasks, the perceptual and production targets, and the data analysis methods, have been reported in similar but different forms in Chan (2010Chan ( , 2011Chan ( , 2012, as they were all different sub-studies of the present study. In Chan (2011), a total of three L2 perception tasks were conducted, one of which was a discrimination task requiring the participants to discriminate between different isolated phones.…”

“…9 The perceptual and production targets reported in this article are slightly different from what have been reported in Chan (2010Chan ( , 2011Chan ( , 2012 For Task 3b and Task 4, the perceived similarity between a pair of L1 and L2 contrasts (e.g., English /i:/ and Cantonese /i/, English /ʃ/ and Cantonese /s/) was found by computing the mean similarity rating using the following formula:…”

“…English speech sounds documented widely in the literature as causing production difficulties were not particularly difficult to perceive, whereas sounds which have not been documented as difficult for production (e.g., /e/, /f/, /l/) did create some perception problems for Cantonese ESL learners. She argued that mother tongue interference, which has been maintained as a main source of production problems, was not necessarily the source of perceptual problems (Chan 2011). Rather, the Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 5/27/15 3:43 PM perception of L2 speech sounds was intimately related to the perceived similarity between L1 and L2 speech sounds: the smaller the perceived distance between an L2 sound and the closest L1 sound, the more difficulty there was in discerning the L2 sound (Chan 2012;cited in Chan 2011).…”