講者：Peggy Pik Ki Mok（莫碧琪教授）(Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, the Chinese University of Hong Kong)
講題：Production of rhotics by Mandarin-English bilingual speakers
時間：2019年3月29日下午12時30分
地點：人社院B305研討室
摘要：Bilingual speakers regularly use two languages, regardless of their proficiency, age of acquisition, or sequence of language learning (Grosjean, 1982). One of the obstacles in speech communication for late bilinguals is accented production of L2 sounds. Cross-linguistic influences have been found in the production of L2 vowels (Flege, 1992; Flege, MacKay, & Meador, 1999; Flege, Munro, & Fox, 1994), obstruents and sonorants (Antoniou, Best, Tyler, & Kroos, 2011; Smith, 2010), as well as prosody (Chen & Mok, 2015; Gananathan, Yin, & Mok, 2015). Theories modelling bilingual speech production have attributed those issues to the mismatches between L1 and L2 phonological categories (Best & Tyler, 2007; Flege, Schirru, & MacKay, 2003). It is less clear, however, how and to what extent language proficiency would affect L2 speech production. Also, due to the technical limitation, mostly acoustic data were examined in previous studies. This study aims to investigate bilingual speech production by examining the production of American English rhotics produced by Mandarin-English bilinguals with two proficiency levels using ultrasound imaging. Studies have shown that the English /ɹ/ is one of the most difficult sounds to acquire for bilingual speakers and for English-speaking children for two reasons (Aoyama, Flege, Guion, Akahane-Yamada, & Yamada, 2004; Bradlow, Pisoni, Akahane-Yamada, & Tohkura, 1997; Gick et al., 2007). First, the production of /ɹ/ requires multiple constrictions in the vocal tract. Second, various lingual gestures can be adopted, from tongue tip-up to tip-down, to produce similar sounds that can be identified as the English /ɹ/. Interestingly, Mandarin has a rhotic sound that is perceptually similar to the English /ɹ/, and has the same phonological distribution. It offers a unique opportunity for us to investigate whether similar sounds in two languages would facilitate or hinder bilingual speech production. This study aims to answer three research questions: 1) How are Mandarin rhotic sounds realized phonetically? 2) How do English and Mandarin interact in the production of /ɹ/ by Mandarin-English bilinguals? 3) How does bilinguals’ L2 proficiency affect the production of English /ɹ/? The current study provides new articulatory evidence to bilingual speech production theories, and shed light on how two acoustically similar sounds are represented and coexist in the sound inventory of bilingual speakers. It will also provide the first ultrasonic data on Mandarin rhotics, which would be useful for future studies on Mandarin rhotics.