Abstract

YANG, Shu; RATO, Anabela Alves dos Santos  and  FLORES, Cristina Maria Moreira. Perception of stop consonants of portuguese L2 influenced by mandarin L1. Diacrítica [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.1, pp.61-93. ISSN 0807-8967.

This work aims to investigate the speech perception of European Portuguese oral stops /b, d, g, p, t, k/ by Chinese learners of European Portuguese (EP) as a second language (L2). In the present study, identification and discrimination tests were carried out to examine the perception of the target consonant stops by three groups of participants, aged between 18 and 30 years old. Two of the groups consisted of native Mandarin speakers, who differed in the level of proficiency of the Portuguese language and the amount and type of contact with the language. One group lived in Portugal for 10 to 12 months and the other group only learned Portuguese in the classroom. The third group included native speakers of EP. In general, the effects of the linguistic immersion experience had only little significance on the learners' phonetic perception. Generally, the participants who lived in Portugal showed better perceptual performance than those without an immersion experience, but only regarding two consonantal segments, namely the identification of /t/ and /k/. The results also revealed that the Chinese learners had difficulties in distinguishing the oral stop consonants according to the voicing parameter.

Keywords : L2 speech perception; stop consonants; linguistic immersion; European Portuguese; Mandarin.

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