Flege, J. E., & Wang, C. (1989). Native-language phonotactic constraints affect how well Chinese subjects perceive the word-final English /t/-/d/ contrast. Journal of Phonetics, 17, 299–315.
In Flege (1989), it was found that native English speakers could identify minimal pairs such as bead and beat with the final consonants /t/ and /d/ truncated, while native Chinese speakers were unable to do so. The fact that native speakers were better than non-native speakers in the identification of sounds indicated that L1 indeed affects how one perceives L2, especially when the phonotactic constraints of the two languages compared are ill-assorted. As a follow-up study, the authors of the present study further examined whether the effect of L1 is the same across three different Chinese languages; namely, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, and Mandarin. Apart from this goal, the authors were also interested in seeing the effect of training as it has been proven that L2 training can improve non-native speakers’ performance in sound identification. Results showed that Cantonese speakers outperformed Shanghaiese speakers, and Shanghaiese speakers outperformed Mandarin speakers both in accuracy and sensitivity. This implied that L1 affects the perception of L2, with the effect being the most conspicuous when L1 and L2 are the most ill-assorted. In terms of the effect of training, the results again confirmed that training was effective, showing that speakers of all three languages improved in their performance in the post-test session.
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