| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 102 === Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese are the two major languages spoken in Taiwan. One of the differences between these two languages is their phonotactic properties. In Mandarin, no consonants are allowed to occur in syllable-coda position except for the nasal consonants /n/ and /ŋ/ while in Taiwanese, bilabial consonants can occur in either the initial position or the coda of a syllable. It is generally observed that many EFL learners in Taiwan pronounce the word-final /m/ sound in English words without the manner of the bilabial ending. This study aimed to investigate the pronunciation of the word-final bilabial sounds of English vocabulary items by EFL learners of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and those of Taiwanese and to test the hypothesis of cross-linguistic transfer of phonology. Besides, this study also intended to explore the relationship between the word-final bilabial production and demographic factors (e.g., gender, age, and education level).
Two experimental groups were recruited, consisting of 48 adult EFL learners of L1 Taiwanese and 60 adult EFL learners of L1 Mandarin Chinese. The participants were asked to perform two speech tasks, a passage reading and the spontaneous retelling of the read passage. The speech data collected along with the demographic characteristics were coded and analyzed statistically by the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The results showed that there was a significant difference between the studied groups on the word-final /m/ production in English, but not on word-final /b/ and /p/, supporting the defferential markedness in phonology. The misproduction rate of word-final bilabial was related to the neighboring phonological environment. The mispronounced word-final /m/ as /n/ can be attributed to the bi-feature of nasal and bilabial, with the nasal overriding the bilabial feature. In addition, there was a decreasing misproduction rate of word-final /m/ with increment of age found in L1 Taiwanese group.
The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the word-final bilabial production of EFL learners in Taiwan. It is hoped that it would invite the attention to the proper articulation on the syllable coda in English for teachers and learners in Taiwan.
|
|---|
