The Study of Phonological Neighborhoods in Chinese L1 and L2 Speech Production

Abstract

The tongue twister paradigm was used to compare numbers and types of errors of native and non-native speakers of Chinese when producing tongue twisters. The stimuli consisted of 106 quadruples, 32 of which were transliterated from English tongue twisters, 26 of which were vocalic twisters, and 48 of which were consonant twisters. Both consonant and vowel errors were investigated (but not tone) and errors were classified as caused by either preceding or following linguistic forms (or as caused by both or neither). To enhance errors, we requested participants to use a speech rate that was 20% faster than the normal rate. Four native Mandarin Chinese speakers and six foreign learners of Chinese read the tongue twisters aloud, repeating each one four times in a slide. The four native Mandarin Chinese speakers made a total of 606 errors, and the non-native speakers produced 3970 errors. The results show a clear difference between L1 and L2 speakers and a relation between years of learning Chinese and total number of errors.