Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 17, 28 November 2023
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Comparing the Discrimination of /b/-/p/-/pʰ/ among Shanghainese and Mandarin Native Speakers
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Abstract
Shanghainese speakers show a variety of phonological phenomena depending on the region and age of the speaker. Junior Shanghainese speakers exhibit a mixture of Mandarin and Shanghainese phonology and usually speak Shanghainese with many discernible differences compared to the old generation of Shanghainese speakers. Crucially, Shanghainese speakers often acquire Shanghainese as a second language and transfer Mandarin phonology to it. This paper aims to examine the ability to discriminate the three-way contrast /b/-/p/-/pʰ/ among senior Shanghainese speakers, junior Shanghainese speakers, and Mandarin speakers through an experimental study. The experiments show that: 1) Senior Shanghainese speakers perform less well when presented with isolated stop sounds, and they use other acoustic cues rather than plain VOT differences in everyday speech; 2) the acquisition of Shanghainese as a second language only has a limited effect on junior Shanghainese speakers’ internal phonology. Therefore, the contribution of this study is that it has determined the importance of VOT in the discrimination of Shanghainese stops and has explored the degree of influence exerted by the acquisition of an L2.
Keywords
Shanghainese, Mandarin, VOT, stops, L2 acquisition
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)
- 978-1-83558-167-4
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-168-1
- Published Date
- 28 November 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/17/20230774
- Copyright
- 28 November 2023
- 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