This study investigates the acquisition of English/■/by Mandarin-English bilinguals from a developmental aspect.First,a detailed description of the acoustic and articulatory(ultrasound)characteristics of Mandarin/■/...This study investigates the acquisition of English/■/by Mandarin-English bilinguals from a developmental aspect.First,a detailed description of the acoustic and articulatory(ultrasound)characteristics of Mandarin/■/is provided to lay the foundation for the cross-linguistic comparison between English and Mandarin rhotic sounds.Second,it investigates if Mandarin-English bilinguals could successfully acquire English/■/sound.The results showed that Mandarin-English bilinguals could learn language-specific phonetic realizations for English/■/,establishing a new phonetic category for the similar L2 sound.In addition,as the language proficiency grows,Mandarin-English bilinguals became more native-like in production,but not in perception.It suggests a rather loose connection between production and perception in the speech acquisition for late bilinguals.展开更多
文摘This study investigates the acquisition of English/■/by Mandarin-English bilinguals from a developmental aspect.First,a detailed description of the acoustic and articulatory(ultrasound)characteristics of Mandarin/■/is provided to lay the foundation for the cross-linguistic comparison between English and Mandarin rhotic sounds.Second,it investigates if Mandarin-English bilinguals could successfully acquire English/■/sound.The results showed that Mandarin-English bilinguals could learn language-specific phonetic realizations for English/■/,establishing a new phonetic category for the similar L2 sound.In addition,as the language proficiency grows,Mandarin-English bilinguals became more native-like in production,but not in perception.It suggests a rather loose connection between production and perception in the speech acquisition for late bilinguals.
