Chunsheng Yang - The Acquisition of Chinese as a Second Language Pronunciation: Segments and Prosody

The series will publish studies in the general area of Speech Prosody with a particular (but non-exclusive) focus on the importance of phonetics and phonology in this field. The topic of speech prosody is today a far larger area of research than is often realised. The number of papers on the topic presented at large international conferences such as Interspeech and ICPhS is considerable and regularly increasing. The proposed book series would be the natural place to publish extended versions of papers presented at the Speech Prosody Conferences, in particular the papers presented in Special Sessions at the conference. This could potentially involve the publication of 3 or 4 volumes every two years ensuring a stable future for the book series. If such publications are produced fairly rapidly, they will in turn provide a strong incentive for the organisation of other special sessions at future Speech Prosody conferences.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11951

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This volume emerged from the 32nd North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-32) held at the University of Connecticut. NACCL-32 was originally scheduled for April 2426, 2020, which was postponed to September 1820, 2020, due to the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US in March 2020. In September 2020, the conference was moved online to ensure the safety and health of all participants. The contributors of this book were not limited to NACCL-32 participants; experts and researchers in Chinese as a second language (CSL) phonetics, phonology and pronunciation in both the US and China were invited to contribute. While all of us had to juggle life and work during this unprecedentedly challenging time, all contributors worked really hard to follow the original plan of publication in all phases of this long process, hence enabling the edited volume to be published in a timely manner. Therefore, my heartfelt thanks and gratitude go to every author and coauthor for their work, punctuality, and, most importantly, contribution to an emerging field, namely, the acquisition of CSL pronunciation.

Research on Chinese as a second language (CSL) has gained great momentum in recent years. Studies on the acquisition of various aspects of CSL have flourished in both journals (Everson 1998; Lee et al. 2010; Li 2012; Jin 1994; So and Best 2010; Wang et al. 2004; Zhang 2010; Yang 2013, 2014; Yang and Chan 2010; Zhao 2012; Ke and Li 2011; Yuan 2010, among many others), and (edited) books (Everson and Xiao 2011; Han 2014; He and Xiao 2008; Jiang 2014; Ke 2018; Shei et al. 2019; Wen 2012; Wen and Jiang 2019; Yuan and Li 2019). Pronunciation is one of the most important components of a language which overlaps with all other aspects of a language (lexicon, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics). Worth noting is that, except for a few books on tone and prosodic acquisition mentioned above, there are no edited volumes or monographs exclusively devoted to CSL pronunciation. While journal articles and chapters in edited volumes/monographs touch upon some topics in CSL pronunciation, many of them, such as those on tone processing (Lee et al. 2010; So and Best 2010; Wang et al. 2004), are motivated more by theoretical issues, such as cross-linguistic speech perception, than by applied or pedagogical concerns in CSL instruction, as Jiang (2014) correctly points out.

Books on Chinese phonetics and phonology primarily examine theoretical issues, such as Chen (2000), Duanmu (2007, 2009, 2016), Wang and Norval (2013), and Zhang (2017). While a few volumes concern the second language acquisition of Mandarin phonetics and phonology, these books either only discuss tone acquisition (Yang 2015; Zhang 2018) or only touch upon limited issues of prosodic acquisition (Yang 2016). To this end, an edited volume devoted to CSL pronunciation is in dire need so that CSL researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students can have a reliable and comprehensive source to refer to.

One of the major guiding principles when editing this volume is the integration of theory, practice and pedagogy. For this purpose, all chapters contain a section on pedagogical implications to put the research findings in perspective so that CSL instructors and practitioners can make research-informed decisions in their teaching practice.

This book consists of fourteen chapters covering a wide range of issues on CSL pronunciation. The fourteen chapters are grouped into three parts. Part I, consisting of seven chapters, concerns tones and segments in L2 Mandarin. The chapter by Min Liu and Rongru Chen analyzes the error types of rhotic onset // produced by Indonesian learners of Mandarin, such as taps, plosives, trills, fricatives, affricates, zero onset and laterals. Acoustic realization of the correctly produced rhotic onset // by the L2 Indonesian learners was found to have a stronger lowering effect on the F3 of the following vowels /a, , u/, suggesting a higher degree of rhoticity in the correct L2 productions. Such detailed error/acoustic analyses of segment production by L2 Mandarin learners are rather limited and, therefore, will be very helpful in assisting L2 learners in noticing their issues in production and enabling instructors to come up with ways to improve on L2 learners segmental production.