Abstract:

Previous work has shown that speakers of some southern Chinese dialects have difficulty perceptually differentiating English /n l/. In this study, an attempt was made to increase the perceptual salience of some possible acoustic cues. Seven native Chinese speakers labeled the first consonant of three combined sets of ten English /n l/ minimal pairs produced by a male and a female native English speaker. One set consisted of unaltered words from the earlier study. The consonant portion of the second set had been normalized for peak amplitude. The peak amplitude of the consonant was then equal to the peak amplitude of the vowel. In the third set, a portion of the CV transition had been normalized. Native English speakers labeled the words with high accuracy. Results and implications will be discussed.