An acoustic comparison of German tense and lax vowels produced by German native speakers and Mandarin Chinese learners

This paper reports on a study of 35 Mandarin Chinese learners who (1) created pitch curves of their spoken word tones and (2) compared their pitch curves with those of native speakers while practicing pronunciation. Following a pretest, the learners received training for 20–25 minutes weekly over nine weeks and took a posttest. Two types of data analyses were performed. First, native speakers of Mandarin auditorily rated the pretests and posttests. The ratings revealed that learners’ pronunciation of tones improved between pretest and posttest. Second, acoustic analyses of the learners’ recordings were conducted, and the learners’ production was compared with that of native speakers. Results indicated that students’ pronunciation of some tones improved in the posttest. The postsurveys indicated that two-thirds of the participants found viewing pitch curves helpful. This study confirms previous research but suggests that acoustic analyses complement auditory analyses with more precise indications of L2 learners’ tonal difficulties.

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Supplemental Material for Effects of Age and Bilingualism on Sensitivity to Native and Nonnative Tone Variation: Evidence From Spoken Word Recognition in Mandarin Chinese Learners

Developmental Psychology ◽

10.1037/dev0001041.supp ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Spoken Word Recognition ◽

Spoken Word ◽

Chinese Learners

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A Comparative Study on Intonation Differences between Chinese Learners and Korean native speakers: focusing on the Non-final Ending '-go' functioning as a Final ending

Dongnam Journal of Korean Language and Literature ◽

10.21654/djkll.2017.44.1.337 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 44 ◽

pp. 337-364

Author(s):

Young-Eun Kim ◽

Keyword(s):

Comparative Study ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Chinese Learners

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Learning opportunities in peer-peer interaction: A case study of two L2 Mandarin Chinese learners

Chinese as a Second Language Research ◽

10.1515/caslar-2020-0008 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 199-226

Author(s):

Dan Jiang

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Second Language Acquisition ◽

Language Learning ◽

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Learning Opportunities ◽

French Immersion ◽

Chinese Learners ◽

Instructed Second Language Acquisition ◽

Negotiation For Meaning

AbstractThe roles of interaction have been studied for several decades. Recent studies have turned to investigate “the details of which components of interaction might be more or less effective in which contexts with which learners” (Loewen, Shawn & Masatoshi Sato. 2018. Interaction and instructed second language acquisition. Language Teaching 51(3). 285–329: 286). This case study, based on three unstructured interactions outside the classroom between two L2 Mandarin Chinese learners, investigates the learning opportunities these interactions brought about in terms of helping them to increase in control over forms that had already been encountered inside the classroom. Using the concept of the language-related episode (Swain, Merrill & Sharon Lapkin. 1998. Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. The Modern Language Journal 82(3). 320–337), this study sets focus on learning opportunities for lexis- and grammar-related items. It finds learning opportunities arise as the two peers negotiate for meaning motivated by the need to comprehend, strive to use the L2 to express/co-express themselves, and improve their form through the other’s feedback. In addition, lexis-related learning is found to be very positive in this study. The dictionary played an indispensable role in facilitating the learners when they encountered lexis-related issues. Further, it enabled the learners to learn new vocabulary when driven by communicative needs. In comparison, the grammar-related learning is found to be relatively complicated. And the fact the learners had nowhere to resort to concerning grammatical issues attributed to it. In terms of the different types of interactions, compared to learning through negotiation for meaning and feedback, output and co-construction/collaboration were found to be most productive in promoting the learning.

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Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s014271642000048x ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Stefan Th. Gries ◽

Stefanie Wulff

Keyword(s):

Native Speakers ◽

First Language ◽

Main Clause ◽

Subordinate Clause ◽

Production Data ◽

Subordinate Clauses ◽

Chinese Learners ◽

Adverbial Clauses ◽

Adverbial Clause ◽

Temporal Adverbial

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

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