Perceptual cue weighting in L1 and L2 Chinese: An investigation of aspiration and frication in Chinese obstruents by Danish learners

Abstract An important part of second language acquisition of sound systems involves the distinction between phoneme contrasts that exist in L2 but not in L1. However, L1 and L2 listeners do not always use the same acoustic cues to perceptually distinguish the contrasts. Most studies concentrate on vowel perception, but perceptual cue weighting in consonants is somewhat under-investigated, although equally relevant. This article investigates the cue-weighting of Chinese /t th ts tsh/ by L1 and Danish L2 listeners. The four phonemes are contrastive, and distinguished in aspiration, frication or both. Moreover, Chinese /th ts tsh/ acoustically all overlap with a single phoneme in Danish /ts/, variably realized as [ts] ~ [th], which make it notoriously difficult to acquire the contrasts. We conducted a cue-weighting experiment to investigate how Danish and Chinese listeners use aspiration and frication to perceptually categorize these Chinese sounds. Our results show that Danish learners are not as sensitive as native Chinese to the deciding cues to distinguish the Chinese phoneme contrasts. This study sheds light on L2 sound acquisition in which different phonemes in the target L2 language correspond to a single but variable phoneme in the native language.