Communications in Humanities Research

- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences


Communications in Humanities Research

Vol. 29, 19 April 2024


Open Access | Article

The Negative Transfer of Chinese Phonology on Students’ English Accents and Its Impact on Accent Perception

Jialing Wu * 1 , Yuqi Ma 2
1 Southwest Jiaotong University
2 Rosedale Global High School

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Communications in Humanities Research, Vol. 29, 60-68
Published 19 April 2024. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by EWA Publishing
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Citation Jialing Wu, Yuqi Ma. The Negative Transfer of Chinese Phonology on Students’ English Accents and Its Impact on Accent Perception. CHR (2024) Vol. 29: 60-68. DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/29/20230528.

Abstract

This paper focuses on the impacts of Chinese phonology on students who learn English as a second language from the production and perception sides. For the production side, this paper focuses on the impacts of Chinese phonology on students’ English accents, taking the phoneme /ɪ/ as an example, based on the framework of negative transfer proposed by Edward Thorndike. For the perception side, this work explores whether there is a correlation between the students’ pronunciation accuracy and accent perception. In this work, ten Chinese international students were invited as subjects for the experiment, and the matched-guise test was chosen as the methodology. The results in this work show that negative transfer did occur when Chinese students pronounce the phoneme /ɪ/, and it seems that pronunciation accuracy doesn't correlate to their perception of accents. The findings have implications for English education and provide suggestions for Chinese students to improve their pronunciation accuracy as well as their perception of accents.

Keywords

negative transfer, pronunciation accuracy, accent, matched guise, language perception

References

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Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Politics and Socio-Humanities
ISBN (Print)
978-1-83558-365-4
ISBN (Online)
978-1-83558-366-1
Published Date
19 April 2024
Series
Communications in Humanities Research
ISSN (Print)
2753-7064
ISSN (Online)
2753-7072
DOI
10.54254/2753-7064/29/20230528
Copyright
19 April 2024
Open Access
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Copyright © 2023 EWA Publishing. Unless Otherwise Stated