The effects of nasalization and duration in the adaptation of English nasals by Taiwan Mandarin speakers

• Main Authors: Chen, Yang-Yu, 陳泱宇
• Other Authors: Lu, Yu-An
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/kcsy59

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 === 106 === In loanword adaptation, different repair strategies are often taken in response to illegal strings in the native grammar (e.g., deletion or insertion in response to NoCoda violation). However, repairs sometimes take place when there are no obvious structural violations in the native grammar. This study aims to investigate the seemingly unnecessary intervocalic nasal gemination of English loanwords in Taiwan Mandarin. Huang and Lin (2013, 2014) reported that English VNV sequences can be adapted into Mandarin Chinese in three ways: singleton nasal (i.e., V.NV; Bruno -> bù.lŭ.nuò), nasal gemination (i.e., VN.NV; Diana -> dài.ān.nà), and variation (i.e., V.NV~VN.NV; Tiffany -> dì.fán.nèi ~ dì.fú.ní). Huang and Lin propose that the nasal gemination rate is correlated with tenseness and stress location: nasal gemination occurs more often when the pre-nasal vowel is non-high, lax, and stressed. They attributed the differential gemination rates to the degree of nasalization and vowel duration—stressed pre-nasal vowels are more nasalized than unstressed ones and shorter vowel duration in VN syllables in Mandarin Chinese is more similar to that of a lax vowel. These two factors, however, generate different predictions. For example, the degree of nasalization is stronger for tense vowels than for lax vowels but lax vowels are in general shorter than tense vowels. The degree of nasalization factor predicts a higher nasal gemination rate for tense vowels while the duration factor predicts a higher nasal gemination rate for lax vowels. This thesis draws on experimental evidence and aims to tease apart the relative contribution of each phonetic factor. Two forced-choice identification experiments were conducted in which the participants were asked to choose between V.NV and VN.NV forms with choices in phonetic transcription (i.e., Bopomofo) displayed on the screen. Experiment 1 showed a weak nasalization effect but a strong Vowel Tenseness effect driven by more nasal gemination responses to lax vowels than to tense ones. We spectulate that this might be due to shorter duration of lax vowels for its similarity to shorter vowel duration of VN syllables in Mandarin. Therefore, we designed the second experiment and manipulated the duration of tense vowels to be shorter and lax vowels to be longer. Nevertheless, Experiment 2 showed a similar trend to Experiment 1—a strong vowel tenseness effect. We propose that it is because Taiwan Mandarin speakers might have perceived the tense vowels as diphthongs (i.e., English /e/ to [eɪ], /o/ to [oʊ]) and inserting a nasal coda is illegal in this contexts (*CVGN). A followup experiment was conducted to further examine the phonotactic hypothesis. The overall results suggested that variations in loanword adaptation were guided by perception as well as phonotactics.