A Tale of Five Fricatives: Consonantal Contrast in Heritage Speakers of Mandarin

Heritage speakers – that is, speakers who have had exposure to a particular language as a child, but who have shifted to another language for the majority of their communication needs – have begun to draw attention in the field of phonological learning. Au, Jun, Knightly, and Oh have jointly explored the phonological competence of heritage speakers in both their subjects’ heritage language and main language. They find that heritage speakers of Spanish and Korean tend to have a phonological advantage over late learners in production of the heritage language, as indicated by acoustic measures such as voice onset time and by holistic perceptual measures such as accent ratings by native speakers (cf. Au et al. 2002; Knightly et al. 2003; Oh et al. 2002, 2003). Of the few studies on heritage language phonology, however, only Godson (2003) explores the neutralization of phonological categories in the heritage language, and only with respect to vowels. Her findings suggest that the Armenian vowels of heritage speakers of Armenian are influenced by their dominant language, English, but that this influence is limited to those Armenian vowels that are close to English vowels and does not necessarily result in the neutralization of contrast. The present study extends this line of inquiry to consonants by comparing fricative production in heritage speakers of Mandarin to that of native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers who have learned Mandarin as a foreign language. We focus on place contrasts among five voiceless fricatives, in particular one between two post-alveolar Mandarin fricatives, retroflex /ʂ/ and alveolo-palatal /ɕ/. Figure 1 shows that in comparison to /ʂ/, the area of contact for /ɕ/ is slightly more forward, going right up to the incisors, as well as significantly wider, extending sideways onto the molars and