跨语言相似度与美国学习者汉语元音习得研究

Effect of Cross-language Phonetic Similarity on American Speakers Acquire Chinese Vowels

本文以汉英元音的相似度为基础,考察美国学习者对汉语元音的习得情况。通过计算学习者和母语者的元音距离分析学习者汉语元音的准确性,通过学习者与母语者元音范畴对比,分析学习者的元音偏误。跨语言语音相似度与二语习得的关系表现为,两种语言间语音的感知相似度决定了母语对二语发音的影响程度,相似度越高影响越大,相似度越低影响越小。对于感知相似度较高的音段来说,当声学相似度与感知相似度的结果差距较大时,母语的影响会相应减小。语言间的相似度也会影响二语发音的准确度,两种语言中完全一致的音段和相似度较低的音段其发音准确度较高,而两种语言中存在一定相似性的音段的发音准确性较低。对于这些相似的音段来说声学相似度决定其发音的准确度,声学相似度越小,发音准确度也越低。

Based on the similarity of Chinese and English vowels, this paper study on American speakers acquired Chinese vowels. Both Chinese vowel accuracy and error for L2 learners had been analyzed, the former through calculated vowel distance between native speaker and L2 learner, and the later through compared vowel category between native speaker and L2 learner. This paper found that cross-language phonetic similarity connects with L2 speech acquisition. Speech perceptual similarity in cross language decides the influence from L1 to L2. The higher the similarity, the lager the influence. For those segments which have higher perceptual similarity, if there is a big difference from acoustical and perceptual similarity, the influence from L1 would been decreased correspondingly. Cross-language similarity also influences pronunciation accuracy. The pronunciation accuracy is high for identical segments and those have lower similarity segments, and it is low for similar segments. The pronunciation accuracy of similar segment is decided by acoustical similarity, the smaller the similarity, the lower the accuracy.