Abstract:
Speakers of some southern dialects of Chinese do not make a distinction between /n/ and /l/ in Chinese. Previous pilot research indicated that they also have difficulty with this distinction both perceptually and productively in English. As a basis for an experiment in training this distinction, a closer exploration of these speakers' perception of English was performed. This study examined these speakers' perception of English /r,l,n,d/. Five native Chinese speakers heard English words from minimally different sets produced by three native English speakers and labeled the first consonant of each word. Native English speakers labeled the same sets with high accuracy. Results and implications for training will be presented.