Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine normative nasalance values in Vietnamese adult speakers with Southern dialect and to investigate the effects of vowels and tones on . Previous studies examining nasalance have been mainly conducted with Indo-European languages. Limited information on nasalance is available in tone languages…

This study is a case study of the effects of tonal L1 on the acquisition of tonal L2, comparing two groups of tonal L1 learners, namely, Chinese Zhuang (C+Z) and Chinese non-Zhuang (C-Z) in the same classroom. The two groups of learners read aloud 60 words from a Thai wordlist, then their tone production was analyzed in two dimensions. The…

Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1-T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1-T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1-T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2-T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2-T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3-T4]) on account of their L1. Method:…

Compared with the study of acquisition of syntax and morphology, there is a relative lack of research on the acquisition of phonology, the L2 acquisition of word stress in particular. This paper investigates the production of word stress by 70 Chinese college students in their reading aloud. Altogether 350 minutes' recordings were collected and…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…