A Comparison of Lexical Tone Effects on VOT in L1 and Three Groups of L2 Speaker of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This study focuses on the effect of lexical tone on Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Mandarin from four different L1 backgrounds. It surveys VOT variations between L1 and L2 speakers. Although it has been suggested that VOT varies because of different lexical tones in L1 Mandarin [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10], a question remains as to whether L2 Mandarin from different language backgrounds also exhibits the same effect. Exploring this can potentially shed light on whether tone effect on VOT is a language-specific or universal phenomenon. In particular, we ask whether L2 speakers who feature different native VOT values, such as Spanish (unaspirated) [11], Japanese (weakly-aspirated) [12], and English (aspirated) [13] [14] would show the same, similar, or different tone effect patterns in comparison to L1 Mandarin (highly-aspirated) [2]. Testing 164 participants (68 Taiwanese, 34 Spanish, 40 Japanese, and 22 English speakers of Mandarin), the results reveal that when other factors were kept constant, tone indeed influenced VOT where tone2 and tone3 had significantly longer VOT values than those in tone1 and tone4 in all four groups. All non-native groups showed the same effects regardless of their L1, which suggests that the tone effect on VOT in Mandarin is a universal tendency, perhaps due to the physiology of the vocal tract rather than due to language-specific phonology. In a baseline VOT test, we also found that the Spanish and Japanese groups showed extended VOT values, which were not from their native VOTs, although their Mandarin VOTs were still significantly shorter than the native Mandarin speakers. This may be due to the deficient learning of the aspiration.