Chinese Learners' Phonetic Transfer of /i/ from Mandarin Chinese to General American English: Evidence from Perception and Production Experiments

Ever since the development of Contrastive Analysis (CA) in the 1950s, which focuses on comparing and contrasting two language systems, linguists have started to systematically explore the influence of the mother tongue on acquiring a second language. This phenomenon is later defined as "language transfer". The current paper concerns language transfer at the phonetic level and concentrates on the transfer phenomenon existing in advanced-level Chinese learners' acquisition of English vowels /i/ and its lax counterpart. By determining whether advanced-level Chinese English-language learners (ELLs) can accurately distinguish between /i/ and its lax counterpart, and pronounce them in English words precisely, this paper serves as a reference for further studying Chinese ELLs' language transfer. Two objectives were to be met: firstly, learners' perceptual ability to distinguish between vowels /i/ and its lax counterpart should be examined; and secondly, the effect of the phonetic transfer should be determined. A perception test and a production test were used to attain these two objectives. Both tests were completed by six advanced-level Chinese ELLs, three males and three females. Results indicate that both male and female participants could consciously distinguish between /i/ and its lax counterpart. All participants have signs of experiencing negative phonetic transfer in their pronunciation, except that the current data do not decisively reflect an impact of the phonetic transfer on female ELLs' acquisition of the high front lax vowel in English words.