Native Mandarin Chinese Learners

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Mandarin Chinese and English have many structural and phonological differences.

So this is the reason why Chinese learners face numerous diffculties in the process

of learning English. Chinese learners especially have experienced diffculties in

pronouncing English sounds.

According to Meng, Zee and Lee (2007), the Chinese learners will mispronunce due to English vowels that are missing in the Cantonese phonetic inventory. The missing vowels are /e, æ, ɒ, ə, ʌ, ɑ/. The Chinese learners will replace the vowels that are close in terms of production and preception. The vowels are / æ,ə,ɑ,ə /For example, the vowel / æ/, the Chinese learners will replace it with "e" as the word "had" in /hæd/, the learners will pronounce inaccurately as "head" in /hed/. They also stated that the vowel /ə/ varies based on the articulatory context as learners does not have a reduced vowel. For example "about" /əˈbaʊt/ may be mispronounced as /abaʊt/. They also stated that there are some substitutions deemed acceptable between English vowels and their Cantonese counterparts. There are /e, ə, ʌ/ For example, vowel /e/, the learners will replace it Cantonese sounds which is /ei/ as in the word "say" in /se/ versus 四 in /sei/.

According to Meng, Zee and Lee (2007), there are vowels that are present in both Cantonese and English, namely /ɪ, i:, ʊ, u, ɔ/. Chinese learners tend to substitute the English vowels with their close L1 neighbours which is Cantonese. For example, the vowel /I/, the word "sit" usually will pronounced as /sɪt/. But the learners will mispronounced as /siːt/ which the word is "seat"

According to Meng, Zee, Lee (2007), they stated that this situation not only just happen in the vowels, but also the consonants. The voiced plosives /b,d,g/ are present in English but absent in Cantonese. The learners often substituted with the voiceless, unaspirated Cantonese plosives /p, t, k/. For example, the word "feed" /fiːd/ is pronounced as "feet" /fiːt/. The word "bag" /bæg/ is pronounced as "back" /bæk/. These word pairs are often not clearly distinguished by Cantonese learners.

According to Meng, Zee, Lee (2007), English affricates are post-alveolar and included voiced and unvoiced namely, /tʃ, dʒ/. These consonant are not exist in Cantonese and are often replaced with the aspirated and unaspirated alveolar affricates /ts/. The English fricatives also missing from the Cantonese inventory. The English /v/a voiced, labiodental fricative is often mispronounced either as the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ or bilabial approximant /w/. Examples are "vast" /vɑːst/ versus "fast" /fɑːst/. "vest" /vest/ versus "west" /west/

There are two English dental fricatives. /θ/ is voiceless and is often mispronounced by the learners as the voiceless Cantonese labiodental /f/. /ð/ is voiced and often mispronounced as the voiced alveolar plosive in Cantonese /t/. Example are "three" /θriː/ versus "free" /friː/. "there" /ðeəʳ/ versus "dare" /deəʳ/. Articulation of the English approximant /r/ involves lip rounding and retroflexion. /r/ is absent from Cantonese and is often substituted with /l/ (lateral approximant). The word "very" /ver.i/ as /vel.i/ or /wel.i/

    The Acqusition of English Phonology in Native Mandarin Chinese Learners

Tiee (1969) conducted a significant study comparing mnosyllabic structures of

American English and Mandarin Chinese. He pointed out that there were many

similarities and differences between the two sound systems. For example, in English

there is a series of vowel sounds in which the muscles of the tongue are tense,

as opposed to the another series in which they are held lax, such as /i/ vs /I/. In Mandarin

Chinese, there is no such contrast there is phonemic. Beebe (1984) also reported that the

English vowel contrast /i/ vs /I/ is diffcult for Chinese learners to tell apart. Tiee (1969)

related that "high front spread vowels" in the two languages are different since English

/i/ the tongue is glided upwards. While in Chinese, the tongue is held steady in high front position without any glide at all. In addition, Tiee (1969) explained that there is much similarity between the low central syllables of the two systems. Mandarin /a/is much like the English /a/ in "father", but is a little farther back. He noticed that "Mandarin speakers

tend to often to slow down the English clustering of non syllabic phonomes and are

insert a sort of / / sound in between the non syllabic of cluster, thus making more

syllables than the word should have. As a result, "act" /aekt/ is pronounced as /aekot/ by

Chinese speakers.

Tiee (1969) reported that Mandarin Chinese speakers often confuse the English

syllables phonomes /i/ and /I/ and substitute one phonomes for the other. It is not difficult

for Chinese learners to distinguish the English /É™/ and /a/ which are much more similar

to the Chinese /e/ and /a/. The most difficult sound for them to pronounce is the English

/ae/, since there is no equivalent sound in Mandarin Chinese. Finally, Tiee (1969)

suggested that in order to train Chinese to produce English sounds correctly, a lot of

exercises in minimal pairs are obviously needed.

According to Chang (1987), he explain that the phonological system of Chinese

is very different from that of English. He also stated that some English phonomes do not

have Chinese counterparts and are hard to learn. Others resemble Chinese phonemes but

are not identical to them in pronunciation and thus cause some confusion. Stress,

intonation and juncture are all areas of difficulty. So in general, Chang say that Chinese

speakers find English hard to pronounce, and have trouble learning to understand the

spoken language.

Chang also points out that Chinese learners tend to shorten the English diphthongs

since Chinese diphthongs are pronounced in a relatively shorter period of time. Chinese

learners confuse /iy/ with /I/ because there is no such distinction in Chinese. Chang

observes that Chinese learners have the tedency to nasalize the English vowel /ae/which

does not occur in Chinese.

Tinloy (1988) discussed the process of learning of a second language. He

claimed that people use their first language to help them learn the second language and themany error they made derived from the influence of their native language. Therefore, the English errors the Chinese learners made may be related to their Chinese language

system since they may apply the "rules" of Mandarin Chinese to English. Chinese

learners may substitute English sounds with those that are similar to Chinese ones. For

example, English has a sound /θ/, as in the word "think" which does not exist in Chinese. The Chinese learners may substitute words that have /θ/ with /s/. As a result, the word "something" might be pronounced as "somesing" by Chinese learners. Juffs (1990) reported that some Chinese learners had a lot of diffculty with the English phonological system. While analyzing Chinese learners stress errors in English

pronunciation, Juffs (1990) concluded that those errors in stress since tone is important in

Mandarin Chinese and stress maybe considered as tone. Thus, Chinese students are much

more conscious of tonic syllables and pay little attention to pitch height on the word level.

According to Juffs, another problematic area for Chinese learners is duration. They have

the tendency to extend the length of the syllable, thus making the syllable tone.

Stockman & Plutt (1992) studied Chinese subjects error in English speech. They

concluded that L2 syllable initial and final consonant error might not be determined

simply by L1/L2 positional contrasts. Stockman and Plunt admitted that their study "did

not focus directly on native English speakers performance". Studies employing a control

group of native English speakers are needed to determine if Chinese and native English

speakers perform alike on oral stop and nasal consonants.

Research of studies on First and second languages

In the era of 1950 and 1960’s, the acoustics studies of the speech sounds was very popular among the researchers. Many researchers had been trying to measure the quality and consonantal differences by means of a sound spectrograph. The earliest research had been done by Peterson & Barney (1952) used the sound spectrograph to analyze American vowels. After they had done their study, their study has become very influential in the area of acoustic studies of speech sounds. They selected seventy six subjects in their study including thirty three men, twenty eight women and fifteen children. From the study, the mean of the frequencies of ten American English vowels by the seventy six speakers were obtained and analyzed. According to Peterson & Barney (1952), children’s format values are the highest frequency and men’s are the lowest with women’s in the middle. But, in this study, Perterson and Barney used two subjects who spoke a foreign language before learning English. Peterson & Barney (1952) concluded that the production of vowel sounds by an individual depends on his or her previous experience.

Howie (1973) another researcher, published his study of Mandarin Chinese vowels and tones, attempting to make some general statements about the acoustical properties of the vowels and tones in Mandarin Chinese. The recording of Mandarin Chinese words done by the Howie through an experiment, where a single subject pronounced the Manadarin Chinese words. The recording was made for the acoustical analysis and the mean of the frequencies of six Chinese vowels were obtained. Howie (1975) concluded that "the acoustical dimensions used in producing the synthetic speech represent a general description of the acoustical properties of Mandarin vowels and tones in citation syallables".

After these few studies that done by the previous researchers, more and more studies have been conducted. The researchers conducted the studies on the production of L2 sounds by non native speakers or Chinese-speaking speakers, using acoustic measurements as indicators. The researchers involved are Fokes & Bond,1989, Flege 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, Munro 1993.

One of the Flege’s study which is Flege’s study 1987b showed that adults can produce an L2 vowel authentically if it is sufficiently dissimilar to any L1 vowel and if the learners have a sufficient L2 exposure. Flege claimed that experienced native English speakers of L2 French pronounced /y/ authentically, while their French /u/ was English-accented.

Flege’s another study (1993) was concerned with the production and perception of the word- final English /t/ and /d/ contrast by Mandarin and Taiwanese (Southern Fu-Jian dialect) speakers including both child learners and adult learners of ESL. He compared the performance of the native English group with that of four Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese groups, which included a childhood L2 learner group, an inexperienced Mandarin late group, an inexperienced Taiwanese late learners group, and an experienced Taiwanese late learners group. The inexperienced and experienced late learner groups were classified according to length of residence in the United States.

While discussing instruction in pronunciation for Chinese students of American English, one of the researcher, Molholt (1988) mentioned that the need to work on the duration of vowels. He claimed that Mandarin Chinese generally has a higher frequency range than the English, and Chinese consonants have a higher frequency than American English cosonants. The Chinese learners cannot differentiate the English /I/ and /i/ in terms of duration. According to Molholt (1988), Chinese students also have difficulty in pronouncing English /É™/ and /ae/

Molholt (1988) stated that even though some Chinese words are similar to the English /ay/, /ey/ and /ow/, Chinese learners of English often use them in the wrong places. Molholt did not say whether these English sounds, which are similar to Chinese sounds, are easier or more difficult for Chinese learners of English, but he suggested that if Chinese students have trouble with the English /Å‹/, the teacher should tell them that it is similar to the final consonant in the word "yellow" /huang/ in Chinese. Still, no evidence has been provided to indicate if similar English sounds would be easier for Chinese students to pronounce.

Because of this, Molholt (1988) did a practical and important action research on teaching English pronounciation for Chinese students. He using a computer and a speech spectrographic display (SSD), Molholt (1988) showed that Chinese students the acoustical information about the location, extent, type and significance of the error with the help of a native speaker’s model.

Phonological comparison among English and Mandarin vowels

According to Ladegeford (2006) and Reetz and Jongman (2009), the American English vowel systems is composed of 11 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. Based on the features of tongue articulation, vowels can be categorised into 4 subgroups : high front (i), low front (ae), high back (u), low back (s), revealing four distinct corners in the vocal tract space. In the terms of tenseness, accoding to Ladegeford 2001a, 2001b, English vowels can be divided into tense vowels[I,ej,u,ow] and lax words[ɪ, ɛ, ʊ, ɔ ]. In producing tense vowels, the root of tongue is drawn forward and the larynx is lowered. On the contrary, no advancement of the tongue root or a lowering of the larynx is found in lax vowels, which seem shorter and slightly more centralized than their tense counterpart.

In Mandarin Chinese, tenseness plays a minor role in vowel inventories. According to Tung 1994, Chen, Robb, Gilbert and Lerman 2001, in Mandarin Chinese, there are seven simple words and four major diphthongs. According to Luo (2002), five English vowels that Mandarin and American English are share in common, which they referred as "familiar" or "similar" sounds for Mandarin speakers. He mentioned that the remaining six American English vowels are often viewed as "unfamiliar" or "new" sounds. Native speakers of Mandrin Chinese may encounter extreme difficulty in producing or pronouncing some English vowels.

But, the research had some criticism. According to Best 1995,1999 and Flege 1995, recent perceptual theories claim that the ability to discriminate L2 sounds accurately is linked to the ability to discern differences between L1 and L2. According to Cebrian 2007, Lengeris and Hazan 2007, in western contexts, it has been argued that L2 perception cannot be predicted by an abstract phonological cross-language comparison, but by learners assimilation results of L1 categories.

According to Peter Avery and Susan Enrich in the Teaching American English pronunciation, there are some problems on the consonants and vowels faced by Chinese students. The first problem is word final voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/. In Chinese, the voiceless stop consonants /p/, /t/ and /k/ occur at the end of a word but these consonants are never released in final position and are much shorter than their English equivalents. When Chinese speakers pronounce these consonants in final position, English speakers may have difficulty hearing them. Thus, a word such as ‘ beat’ may sound like ‘bee’ and ‘back’ sound like ‘bag’.

The second problem is voiced /b/, /d/, /g/ and voiceless /p/, /t/, /k/ stops in word final position. In Chinese, there are no voiced stops at the end of words. Chinese speakers need practice in distinguishing between voiced and voiceless stops in this position. For example, words such as ‘cap’ and ‘cab’ may sund identical, with a short unreleased /p/ at the end of both words.

The third problems is voiced fricatives /v/, / ð / as in ‘bathe’ and affricates /z/, / ʒ /as in ‘beige’ and / d͡ʒ / as in ‘judge’. As voiced fricative and affricate sounds do not exist in Chinese, Chinese speakers generally require practice in producing them. Often voiceless fricatives and affricates are substituted for the appropriate voiced ones.

The four problems is /l/ and /w/ as in ‘mole’ and ‘mow’. Chinese speakers will produce a sound more like a /w/ than a dark /l/ after a vowel. Thus, ‘mole’ will be produced as ‘mow’, ‘goal’ as ‘go’ and ‘old’ as ‘ode’. Words such as ‘feel’ and ‘veal’ may sound like ‘few’ and ‘view’.

The five problems is word final nasals, /m, /n/, /ng/. In word final nasal sounds are much shorter in Chinese than in English. As a result, English speakers may not able to identify the nasal that has been produced, thus, confusing words such as ‘sin’ and ‘sing’. Chinese speakers must learn to lengthen word-final nasal sounds. In addition, the /n/ and /ng/ sounds are often confused by Chinese speakers.

The next problems is /r/, /w/ and /l/. For Chinese speakers, they often pronounce word initial /r/ and /w/. this can lead to confusion between words such as ‘right’ and ‘white’. Alternatively, they may substitute /l/and /r/, particularly in initial consonant clusters.

The following problems is /w/ and/v/ as in ‘west’ and ‘vest’. Chinese speakers often confuse /w/ and /v/. At the beginning of words, they produce what sounds like a /w/, pronouncing a word such as ‘west’ and ‘vest’. / θ / and / ð / as in ‘think and ‘this’. Chinese students will often substitute either /t/ and/f/ for / θ / in ‘think’ and /d/ for / ð / in ‘this’. In word final position /f/ is usually substituted for both / ð /and / θ /, with Chinese speakers producing ‘wif’ instead of ‘with’

Chinese has no consonant clusters in initial or final position. Chinese speakers must, therefore, learn to produce a large of variety of new syllable types that contain consonant clusters.

Second language learners like Chinese speakers often produce the two vowels of each identically, using neither the tense nor the lax vowel, but a vowel between the two. Failure to make the distinctions can lead to misunderstandings. Words such as ‘sleep’, ‘taste’ and ‘stewed’ may be heard bby English speakers as ‘slip’ ‘test’ and ‘stood’ respectively.

The second problems is / ɛ/ vs /æ/ as in ‘bet’ and ‘bat’. Chinese speakers have difficulty distinguishing between / ɛ/ and /æ/. This problem is particularly severe before nasals, as in ‘ten’ and ‘tan’, ‘bend’ and ‘band’ vs /ʌ/ vs /a/ as in ‘but’ and ‘pot’.

Besides problems in consonant and vowels, Chinese speakers also face stress, rhythm and intonation problems. In word stress, the Chinese words generally consists of only one syllable. Chinese speakers may have difficulty in producing the longer words of English with appropriate stress patterns. The characteristics rhythm of English is closely bound up with the correct pronunciation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Vowels in unstressed syllable are reduced and vowels in stressed syllables are longer and spoken with greater volume. Many ESL students like Chinese learners fail to differentiate sufficiently between stressed and unstressed vowels, producing full vowels in unstressed syllables. The particular full vowel used may be influenced by the spelling. Chinese students often have difficulty with contractions because of the difficult consonant clusters that are created.

According to Peter Avery and Susan Enrich in the Teaching American English pronunciation, in linking, Chinese students often fail to link words. They tend to separate words through the use pauses or the insertion of additional sounds at the ends of words. This makes their speech sound very choppy. In intonation, Chinese speakers may have difficulty with the characteristic intonation pattern of English because pitch functions differently in Chinese. For example, in Chinese Mandarin, the word ‘na’ said with a rising pitch means ‘to take’. Said with a falling pitch, it means ‘to pay taxes’. Languages that use pitch to signal a difference in meaning between words are referred to as tone languages. But English does not use pitch in this way.

Chu (1997) another researcher also conduct a study on junior high school students’ pronunciation skill with a focus on their command of English spelling-sound correspondences. During the study, she found and observes the following common articulation errors that the students make :

Mispronouncing vowel sound of low front /ae/, which is usually replaced by mid front /É›/.

Failing to distinguish the lax vowel /I/ and tense vowel /i/

Confusing the phoneme /ʌ/ with /ɑ/ when pronouncing the word study

Mispronouncing vowel sound of front vowel /e/. a substantial number of students mispronouncing late as /let/.

She also observes that same errors are related to students confusion of vowel letter with phonetic symbols. There are students who pronounce ride as /rid/, wrongly corresponding the letter i to the phoneme /i/. Similarly, students pronounce not as /not/, hot as /hot/ and move as /mov/ and pronounce letter a as /É‘/.

She concludes that quite a few students are not aware that spelling patterns decide the phonetic values of single vowel letters. Many errors are caused by assigning a short sound to a letter when the spelling pattern requires a long vowel or short vowel.

A framework of phonetic similarity had been proposed by Dopke (2000). Dopke (2000) applied a languages-in contact proposal to phonological development. When languages come into contact, they exhibit mutual influences. He also stated that when there are structural similarities in the two languages, knowledge of the basic sounds in one languages will be transferred to the other languages. For example, he give the example of nasals /m,n,Å‹/ occur in English and Mandarin Chinese. These nasal sounds are likely to be transferred to the second language of English-Chinese bilingual speakers. When the differences between two phonomes are subtle, change may occur at the phoneme level. He also gives the example of the lack of long and short vowels in Mandarin Chinese might have a negative effect on English vowels. /u/ and / ÊŠ/ in English are distinguished by quality and length. However, these vowels are close enough in production characteristics that English-Chinese bilingual speakers might regard them as the same vowel.

In Teng’s (2002) investigation, he investigated the Chinese student’s performance in the pronunciation of eight English tense and lax vowels, namely, /i/, /I/, /e/ and /ɛ/, /u/ and /ʊ/ as well as /o/ and /ɔ/, the students are found to show the tendency of frequently substituting the tense vowel with its corresponding lax vowel. He found that the students may borrow sounds from their native language for the target vowels, either for the tense or the lax vowel in each pair. Besides, the students tend to use prolonged lax vowels as the substitute for tense vowels.

According to the findings in the previous research, Chinese students difficulties in pronouncing English vowels problems are as follows

Chinese students have a hard time differentiating the vowels of neighboring tongue position. Therefore they tend to confuse /a/ and /ʌ/. Students prefer to use /ɛ/ to replace the neighbouring front vowels /e/ and /ae/.

Chinese students lack the awareness of lax vowels or lax vowels, therefore they confuse tense and lax vowels. The students tend to use short or lax vowels to replace their corresponding tense vowels.

Students tend to confuse vowel letters with phonetic symbols, therefore they pronounce letter a as /a/

Student do not really understand that spelling patterns decide the phonetic value of simple vowel letters. For instance, students are not fully aware that vowels are usually long vowels.

The following table are shows the difference between English, Chinese consonants and vowels

English

Mandarin Chinese

Syllable initial consonants

24 consonants

b, p, d, t, g, k, v, f, θ,

ð, z, s, ʒ, ʃ, h, m, n,

ŋ, l, r, dʒ, tʃ

(inclusive of glides)

2 glides (j, w)

24 consonants

P, ph ,t, th , k, kh , f, s , s, c, tsh , ts, tsh , tc, tch , m, n , l ,r

(inclusive of glides)

3 glides (j, w, ɥ)

Syllable final consonants

20 consonants

b, p, d, t, g, k, v, f, θ,

ð, z, s, ʒ, ʃ, m, n, ŋ,

l, dʒ, tʃ

2 consonants

n, Å‹

Vowels

13 monophthongs

ʌ, ɑ:, æ, e, ə, ɜ:, , ,

i:, É’, É”:, ÊŠ, u:

8 diphthongs

aɪ, aʊ, əʊ

9 monophthongs

i, u, y, o, ɤ, ᴀ, ə, ɚ, ɛ

9 diphthongs

ae, ei, ow, ao, iá´€, iÉ›,

uá´€, uo, yÉ›

4 triphthongs

iao, iow, uae, uei

(adapted from Phoon, 2010)

As can been seen from the Table, English has comparable number of consonants in the first and final syllable. Mandarin Chinese has 24 consonants in first syllable, but only two consonants in the final syllable. Mandarin Chinese have fewer syllable final consonants than English. It is presumed that the speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Malay will find realization of consonants in final syllables difficult (Phoon, 2010).