Mutual Intelligibility of English Vowels by Chinese Dialect Speakers

This mutual intelligibility study contains a production and perception experiment on English vowels by Chinese learners. In the production experiment, 45 male first-year Chinese college students were recorded. They hailed from nine different dialectal backgrounds (three supergroups), with five speakers per dialect group. The stimuli were , , , , , , , and . Formants as well as durations were measured. Linear Discriminant Analyses showed that the speakers’ dialect backgrounds can be predicted better than chance, but only at the supergroup level. In the perception part, one representative male speaker was chosen for each dialect based on his Euclidean distance from a model American speaker. The representative vowel tokens were then identified and rated for typicality by 282 first-year undergraduates from the same nine dialect groups. A significant interlanguage benefit (i.e. better identification results when listener and speaker share the same language background) was found, but again only on the dialect supergroup level.