| 英文摘要 |
When studying r-fulness, many researchers (e.g. Decamp, 1972; Paolillo, 1995; Lee, 2006) assumed that all the Taiwanese participants in their studies are native speakers of Mandarin and did not take their actual first language into account. However, most Taiwanese speak Southern Min instead of Mandarin as a first language or are bilingual in both languages. Lee’s (2006) and Paolillo’s studies show that the final retroflection used in Mandarin does not guarantee the correct use of the /r/ in the word-final position within an English word. The scarcity of research in the literature addressing postvocalic /r/ in the medial position among Taiwanese EFL learners motivated this pilot study. The participants are 17 Taiwanese graduate students at a large mid-western university and some of their spouses with 7 speaking Mandarin and 10 Southern Min as a first language. They were asked to read a short English passage that the researcher wrote for this study without knowing the focus of the study was on r-fulness. The analyses of their recorded speeches show that the Southern Min group’s medial r-fulness is significantly higher than that of the Mandarin group. However, there is no significant difference in the final r-fulness between the two groups. The low overall r-fulness of the Mandarin group contradicts Decamp’s extrapolation that Mandarin speakers can transfer the retroflection of Mandarin and produce postvocalic /r/ without difficulty. On the other hand, it is consistent with the overwhelming tendency of deletion of postvocalic /r/ among Mandarin speakers in Paolillo’s study. Moreover, the r-fulness of the Mandarin group in the final position corroborates previous studies in that the final retroflection in Mandarin does not guarantee the correct use of /r/ in the word-final position in English and there may be sociolinguistic variation. Pedagogical implications are proposed for EFL teachers and suggestions are made for policy makers. |
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