Perception and production of L2 Mandarin stop consonants by Malaysian Malay speakers / Magdalene Vethanayagam James

Magdalene Vethanayagam , James (2023) Perception and production of L2 Mandarin stop consonants by Malaysian Malay speakers / Magdalene Vethanayagam James. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Limited studies have been done on second language acquisition in the Mandarin language by Malaysian Malay learners. Therefore, the current study addressed this literature gap by systematically describing Mandarin stop consonant acquisition among Malaysian Malay learners. To ascertain whether Malaysian Malay learners have difficulty perceiving and producing Mandarin voiceless unaspirated and aspirated stops, this study examined the perception and production of L2 Mandarin stop consonants as well as the L2 acquisition of Mandarin unaspirated and aspirated consonants. Ten Mandarin teachers whose first language is Malay participated in this research. The two main data sources of this research were a perception task and a production test. The purpose of the perception task was to test whether Malaysian Malay learners perceptually contrast Mandarin aspirated stops from unaspirated stops by making the participants listen to 24 words and write down pinyin. The results showed that out of 240 tokens (24 x 10), only four errors occurred. This indicates that Malaysian Malay speakers can accurately perceive voiceless aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants. On the other hand, the purpose of the production task was to enable Malaysian Malay learners to differentiate aspirated Mandarin stop consonants from their unaspirated counterparts during the production of Mandarin stop consonants in terms of voice onset time (VOT) values. For this task, the participants read 40 Mandarin words. Based on the analysis of VOT, the most difficult consonants for the participants to produce were /p/, while the easiest consonants for the participants to produce were

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