Southwestern Mandarin Speakers' Production of English Work-Final /L/ and /N/

Abstract

The study examines how Southwestern Mandarin (SW) speakers pronounce English words with final alveolar nasal or lateral consonants. In addition, the study examines the intelligibility of SW Mandarin speakers’ English word reading when heard by non-SW Mandarin Chinese English teachers. Twenty-five SW Mandarin speakers and forty nonSW Mandarin listeners were involved in the study. The results showed that SW Mandarin speakers do not consistently produce either word-final /n/ or /l/, most often deleting the final consonant, although word-final /n/ had a higher pronunciation accuracy rate than word-final /l/. Words that represented the most common mispronunciation, deletion, were played for non-SW Mandarin English teachers who were asked to write down the words that they heard. Results showed that deletions of both final /n/ and /l/ resulted in strong loss of intelligibility, suggesting that final deletions are important for intelligibility in English as a lingua franca interaction.