Influences of vowels on the perception of nasal codas in Mandarin for Japanese and Chinese natives
ZHANG Jinsong1,2, WANG Zuyan1
1. Center for Studies of Chinese as a Second Language, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083, China;
2. College of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing 100083, China
Abstract：Japanese natives often have difficulties discriminating between the Chinese alveolar and velar finals. The perceptual differences between Japanese and Chinese natives are studied using different speech stimuli synthesized by concatenating speech segments including the vowel, the nasalized vowel and the nasal coda in different ways for use in a series of sound discriminating experiments. The results show that the nasalized vowels play key roles in cueing Chinese subjects to judge the nasal coda but have less effect for Japanese subjects. When the nasalized vowel portions are missing, the vowel nuclei have similar influences on the perceptions of the Chinese and Japanese. Larger acoustic differences between the vowel nuclei for alveolar/velar pairs enable both the Chinese and Japanese subjects to more accurately distinguish them. These findings can clarify the perceptual cues for Chinese nasal finals and will lead to more efficient methods to teach Chinese to Japanese students.
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ZHANG Jinsong, WANG Zuyan. Influences of vowels on the perception of nasal codas in Mandarin for Japanese and Chinese natives. Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology), 2017, 57(2): 164-169.
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2017, Vol. 57 
