Effect of experience on Chinese assimilation and identification of English consonants

Two groups of Chinese listeners with different English experience participated in an English to Chinese consonant assimilation experiment and an English consonant identification experiment. The results show that listeners with high English experience had a more concentrated assimilation pattern than low experience listeners. However, the goodness ratings did not differ much between the two groups. These results support the idea of “rephonologization” raised by the theoretical model PAM-L2. The results also demonstrate that there was significant high correlation between assimilation overlap and confusion for the low experience group but not for the high experience group, indicating the assimilation pattern of the high experience group may not truthfully reflect the perceptual similarity between the two language sounds.