Gradient phonemic contrast in Nanjing Mandarin

Sounds that are contrastive in a language are rated by listeners as being more different from each other than sounds that don’t occur in the language or sounds that are allophones of a single phoneme. The study reported in this paper replicates this finding and adds new data on the perceptual impact of learning a language with a new contrast. Two groups of speakers of the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin Chinese were tested. One group was older and had not been required to learn standard Mandarin as school children, while the other younger group had learned standard Mandarin in school. Nanjing dialect does not contrast [n] and [l], while standard Mandarin does. Listeners rated the similarity of naturally produced non-words presented in pairs, where the only difference between the tokens was the medial consonant. Pairs contrasting [n] and [l] were rated by older Nanjing speakers as if two [n] tokens or two [l] tokens had been presented, while these same pairs were rated by younger Nanjing speakers as noticeably different but not as different as pairs that contrast in their native language. Introduction The variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Nanjing does not have a contrast between [n] and [l] (Song, 2015), while the standard variety which is now taught in schools in Nanjing does have this contrast. Prior research has shown that speech perception is modulated by linguistic experience. Years of research has shown that listeners find it very difficult to perceive differences between sounds that are not contrastive in their language (Goto, 1971; Werker & Tees, 1984; Flege, 1995; Best et al., 2001). More recently the role of allophony in perception has been studied, finding that sounds in an allophonic relationship in a language are not as perceptually distinct as sounds that are contrastive (Boomershine et al., 2008; Huang & Johnson, 2010; Johnson & Babel, 2010). The present study concerns the impact of another type of linguistic experience. This experiment tested whether second language acquisition may influence sound similarity. This was done by comparing older Nanjing dialect speakers, who have limited experience with standard Mandarin with younger speakers of the Nanjing dialect who learned standard Mandarin from an early age in school. The experiment reported here was designed to test the subjective perceptual consequences of lack of [n]/[l] contrast in Nanjing dialect, and whether learning the standard variety of Mandarin in school would result in an increase in sensitivity to the constrast. We compared the performance of the Nanjing listeners with a group of listeners whose native language constrasts [n] and [l], namely American English. Tables 1 and 2 show consonant inventories of English and Nanjing Mandarin. Note that the /ʐ/ phoneme in Nanjing dialect can be pronounced [ɹ] (Chao, 1929). Recent evidence (Liao & Shi, 1987; and Lin, 1995) shows that the Nanjing retroflex voiced fricative /ʐ/ is pronounced without frication noise [ɹ] intervocalically, especially before [a], and [ʐ] at word onset. Methods Listeners. Thirty-two speakers of Nanjing dialect participated in this study. They were recruited and the experiment conducted at Nanjing Normal University. One group of 16 Nanjing speakers (9 women, 7 men) was composed relatively young people (mean age = 30.9, min = 19.9, max = 45.6), while the other group of 16 (8 men, 8 women) were older (mean age = 61.4, min = 48.6, max = 74.6). In addition, we ran a group of 35 college students at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Lab Annual Report (2016)