Stefanie Reed’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

Previous studies found that non-native vowel categorization can be explained by the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), based on perception experiments. However, fewer production studies have been carried out to further support the findings. Here we examined English monophthongs and diphthongs produced by Mandarin learners of English (MAE), compared with those produced by native American English (AE) Speakers, based on the articulatory and acoustic data in an electromagnetic articulometry (EMA) corpus [Berry and Johnson, 2014, ICASSP] with 20 MAE and 20 AE speakers. Monophthongs were examined at mid-point and diphthongs at nine equally-spaced time points (i.e., every 10% of a total vowel duration). Our preliminary results reveal that PAM-predicted perceptually assimilated vowel categories (i.e., vowel pair/contrast not exist in L1, such as the /i-ɪ/ contrast in AE) were indeed produced as a single category with large articulatory overlap. Further, if the English diphthong has a counterpart in Mandarin, it undergoes L1 transfer; if not, it is produced as a sequence of two monophthongs. For example, the English /aɪ/ can be categorized in Mandarin diphthong /aɪ/ but English /ɔɪ/ does not exist in Mandarin; and /aɪ/ produced by MAE underwent reduction as in native Mandarin diphthong but /ɔɪ/ did not.