This study set out to examine how correctly Mandarin speakers produced and perceived English vowels and to explore the relationship between the production and the perception of English vowels by Mandarin speakers. Fifteen native Mandarin speakers, who had lived in Canada for at least two years and received an IELTS score of 6.5 or above, participated in this study. Fifteen native speakers of Canadian English living in Vancouver at the time of the study also participated as a control group. Two experiments were conducted involving 10 English vowels: /i/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ʊ/, /u/, /ʊ/, /ɔ/, /o/, and /ʌ/. In Experiment 1, both the Mandarin speakers and the native English speakers were recorded producing the ten vowels in a /bVt/ syllable in a carrier sentence. The vowels in the recordings were then identified by four native English listeners. In Experiment 2, the Mandarin speakers did an identification test of the vowels produced by the English speakers in Experiment 1. The results showed that Mandarin speakers in this study were able to produce and perceive certain English vowels correctly, but not all of them. The results also indicated that the relationship between the production and perception of English vowels by Mandarin speakers cannot be interpreted in a straightforward way, and that that L2 experience, in terms of length of residence, age of arrival, years of learning, and age when ESL learning starts, might also play an important role in the production and perception of English vowels by Mandarin speakers. / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to explore how syntactic skill was maintained or lost by L2 Mandarin Chinese learners over time. In addition, this study endeavored to discover how a learner's L1 affects the attrition process of word order in Mandarin Chinese. To find out how certain Chinese syntactic structures were subject to attrition over time and how syntactic errors could be attributed to L1 transfer, five types of Chinese syntax that either resembled English, were very different from English, or had no counterpart in English were selected. They included subject-verb-object sentences, modifiers before modified, time and other adverbial clauses, and object-raising in Chinese specific ba construction. Twenty-four university students of Chinese-as-a-second-language speakers, who intensively learned and used Mandarin Chinese in a host culture setting for 16-22 months, participated in this study. By the time participants were tested a second time, they had discontinued regular usage of the L2 for 12 to 17 years. To find out how L2 syntactic attrition developed over time, participants were divided into three groups according to the year of departure from the L2 environment. They were also grouped into two groups by the length of time in the L2 setting to examine whether exposure time to the L2 affected the maintenance of overall L2 syntactic skill. The results indicated that the subjects retain a fair amount of their language education within the first couple years of discontinued regular L2 usage. In the meantime, it was found that the extra six months exposed to the L2 does not extend the long-term maintenance of overall L2 syntactic skill. The results did not show that the distance of structural properties between the learner's L1 and L2 necessarily predicted patterns of regression towards L1 syntactic ordering. Instead, the frequency of use, how often the structure appears in daily interaction with the target society and how well the syntactic structure was acquired in the first place, played a greater role in predicting whether the structure will likely be forgotten.

This research examines how competing factors determine the articulation of English stop-stop sequences across word boundaries in both native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speech. The two general questions that drive this research are 1) how is consonantal coordination implemented across English words? And 2) is this implementation different in L1 versus L2 speech? A group of 15 native English (NE) speakers and a group of 25 native Mandarin speakers (NM) who use English as a foreign language (ESL) participated in this study. The stimuli employed in this research were designed along four major parameters: 1) place of articulation, 2) lexical frequency, 3) stress, and 4) speech rate. The release percentages and closure duration ratios produced by English and Mandarin speakers were measured. The results showed that place of articulation had different effects on English and Mandarin speakers in their English stop-stop coarticulation, especially in heterorganic clusters. Specifically, a place order effect (i.e., more releases and more overlap in front-back clusters than in back-front clusters; POE) was only partially supported in native speech but not shown at all in nonnative speech in the current research. The results also confirmed a gradient lexical frequency effect, finding a significant correlation between self-rated frequency and overlap. A group difference was observed in the interaction between the effects of place of articulation and categorical frequency (real words vs. nonwords). In addition, the results showed, unexpectedly, a stronger stress effect for the NM group rather than for the NE group. Further analyses showed that increased speech rate did not systematically induce increased temporal overlap, because speakers from both groups varied in their behavior, having either more or less overlap at the fast speech rate than at the slow rate. Lastly, the analyses found no correlation between closure duration ratio and perceived accent in L2 speech. This finding was not predicted, given that timing features had always been considered critical to foreign accent perception. / Graduate

<p dir="ltr">Comprehensibility refers to the degree of effort that a listener requires to understand a speaker’s utterance (Derwing & Munro, 1997; Munro & Derwing, 1995; Derwing & Munro, 2005). Previous studies on L2 pronunciation have found that segmental errors could affect comprehensibility (Derwing et al., 1998; Derwing & Munro, 1997; Isaacs & Thomson, 2020; Saito et al., 2017). However, this finding only indicates a correlation between the number of segmental errors and lower comprehensibility. It is still unclear what aspects of pronunciation L2 learners need to practice in order to improve the comprehensibility of their speech. This thesis proposes that the degree of acoustic contrast may play a role in determining comprehensibility. More specifically, it investigates the relation between Mandarin speakers’ acoustic contrast between tense and lax vowels in English (i.e., [i] and [ɪ], [u] and [ʊ]) and the perceived comprehensibility of their speech.</p><p dir="ltr">A sentence production task and a comprehensibility rating task were conducted. In the sentence production task, 20 Mandarin speakers and 10 English speakers read aloud English sentences containing tense and lax vowels and were audio-recorded. The acoustic measurements of the vowels were taken in order to compare Mandarin speakers’ acoustic realization of the tense and lax vowels with English speakers’ productions. In the comprehensibility rating task, 48 English speakers transcribed the sentences recorded during the sentence production task and rated the comprehensibility of the sentences. The comprehensibility ratings were tested for correlation with the number of transcription errors, the degree of spectral and durational contrasts between vowels, and the speakers’ US residency length, in order to investigate the relation between intelligibility errors and comprehensibility, between acoustic contrast and comprehensibility, and between US residency length and comprehensibility.</p><p dir="ltr">The results of the linear-mixed effect model indicated that spectral contrast between [u] - [ʊ], but not [i] - [ɪ], was significantly reduced in Mandarin speakers’ productions compared to the English speakers, suggesting that Mandarin speakers under-differentiated the back vowel pair. A correlation test using Kendall’s <i>tau</i> indicated a significant negative correlation between number of intelligibility errors and comprehensibility, suggesting that intelligibility errors decreased comprehensibility. A correlation test using Kendall’s <i>tau</i> indicated a significant positive correlation between the degree of spectral contrast and comprehensibility rating for sentences with semantically meaningful context, suggesting that increasing the contrast between tense and lax vowels could help increase the comprehensibility of speech. Finally, a correlation test using Kendall’s <i>tau</i><i> </i>indicated no significant correlation between US residency length and comprehensibility, meaning that the relation between residency length and comprehensibility was not confirmed.</p><p dir="ltr">To sum up, acoustic contrast could be one of the contributors to speech comprehensibility. Therefore, directing English L2 learners to focus on increasing the acoustic distance between contrasting vowels could prove a fruitful strategy for improving the comprehensibility of L2 speech.</p>

[pt] O presente trabalho estuda, à luz do conceito de interculturalismo, da sociologia linguística interacional, bem como das filosofias confucianas, como é realizado o ato de fala de recusa no português do Brasil e no mandarim da China Continental. De modo geral, o ato de recusa pode representar descortesia e falta de interesse do falante; pode ainda causar desentendimento entre os interlocutores, sobretudo quando são de países de culturas diferentes. Entretanto, tanto no português quanto no mandarim, existem vários fatores e estratégias envolvidas na enunciação de tal ato, além de semelhanças e diferenças presentes nesses recursos. O corpus utilizado nesta pesquisa é construído pelas cenas selecionadas de dois programas televisivos: A Grande Família (2001-2011, Rio de Janeiro/Brasil) e Mamãe Tigre Papai Gato (2015, Beijing/China). Através desses dados, apresentamos as principais estratégias de recusa presentes nas duas línguas, bem como os fatores interculturais que interferem na escolha de tais estratégias. / [en] The purpose of this research is to investigate how the speech act of refusing is realized in Brazilian Portuguese and in Mandarin of Mainland China from the perspectives of the concept of interculturalism, linguistic sociology and some Confucian thoughts. In general, refusals present discourtesy and lack of interest on the part of the speaker; this speech act can even cause misunderstandings between people, especially when they come from different culture origins. Nevertheless, several factors and strategies can be identified in refusal speech act in both Portuguese and Mandarin, besides some similarities and differences, which can be verified in those strategies. The corpus used in this study is formed of analysis of scenes collected from two television programs: The Big Family/A Grande Família (2001-2011, Rio de Janeiro/Brazil) and Tiger Mother Cat Father(2015, Beijing/China). By observing these data, we present the main strategies of refusing identified in the two languages, as well as the intercultural factors which interfere in the selection of these strategies.