The Perceptual Experimental Study Of Mandarin Plosive/Afficate By Chinese-Indonesian Students

Previous studies have found that infants born with the abilities of perceiving language-universal speech category boundaries.However, this ability will gradually decline, and the ability of perceiving mother tongue will continuously improve. Nowadays cross-language perception study has aroused more and more attention, and numerous perception experiments show that people have different ways in perceiving mother tongue and second language.The reason is that the mother tongue experience of listeners affected their perception of second language speech.With regard to the processing in the second language speech perception,it came out with all kinds of explanations,while most of them are concerned with the factors of the phonological properties of mother tongue.and the speech acoustic properties,which attune native speaker’s perception of second language.In other words, native speaker mainly conform to native-language phonological categories when assimilating or dissimilating the second language. In this paper.we will seek for how Chinese-Indonesian students perceive Mandarin.Indonesia language and Mandarin belong to two different languages and there is a great difference between those two.Therefore,this study will examine the identification and distinction of Mandarin plosive/affricate by Chinese-Indonesian students.We are trying to explore whether speech environment and language experience exert an influence on the perception of Mandarin plosive/afficate by the Chinese-Indonesian students. If it does,how do they perceive?This paper consists of five parts:The first part is the previous studies.We mainly introduced the existing studies on mandarin plosive/affricate and the acquisition of Mandarin plosive/affricate by Indonesian students.We also briefly introduces the related theory backgrounds, especially focus on two models:perceptual assimilation model (PAM) and speech perception model (SLM).The two models were the theoretical basis of this paper.The second part is the comparison of mandarin and Indonesian consonant.It firstly introduced the consonant system of Chinese and Indonesian. Then it compared the main differences between them.Lastly, we listed the common errors made by Indonesian students.The third part is the perceptual assimilation experiment.It includes the experimental hypotheses, methods and results.114 subjects took part in the experiment, according to their Chinese level,they were divided into three groups (elemental-level,middle-level.high-level).There are 38 subjects in each group.Subjects identified Mandarin plosive/affricate in terms of Indonesia language category and rated the similarity. The experimental data analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The results show that the subjects according to their native language category assimilate Mandarin plosive/afficate to voiceless/voiced category of Indonesia language.The subjects assimilate Mandarin unaspirated plosive to Indonesia language voiceless category,and assimilate Mandarin aspirated plosive/afficate to Indonesia voiceless/voiced category. Vowels environment and the second language experience didn’t exert any significant impact on the subjects.The fourth part is the perceptual distinction experiment.It includes the experimental hypotheses, subjects.methods and results.The subjects were the same as the perceptual assimilation experiment.This experiment examined the distinction of aspirated-unaspirated and three groups of affricates by Chinese-Indonesian students.The experimental data analyzed with SPSS17.0.The results show that the subjects could distinguish aspirated-unaspirated very well.And they can distinguish Mandarin lingual/apical affricates.But it is difficult for subjects to distinguish front dental-prepalatal affricates.The fifth part discussed the results of the two experiments. We try to analyze its reasons, and put forward the conclusion from the aspects of perception. At the end of this paper,further study trend worthy pursuing in this field is prospected.