區分英語字句字段的聽力感知比較：爆發停止音素對聲門停止音素

PERCEPTUAL COMPARISON OF WORD BOUNDARY SEGMENTAL CUES: ASPIRATION VS. GLOTTAL STOP

關於英語單詞字段感知的研究報告表示，美語人士聽「聲門停止音」比「爆發停止音」更為精準（Nakatani and Dukes 1977）。從許多不同背景的第二語言學習者（西班牙語：Altenberg 2005；日語：Ito and Strange 2009；法語：Shoemaker 2014；阿拉伯語：Alammar 2016）等，也得到相同結論。本研究延續上述調查，報告對於中文人士對爆發停止音的敏感性是否會幫助他們在聽力感知上，用於英語字句分段時使用。結果顯示，當詞句中有聲門停止音時，他們區分字句的能力比那些有爆發停止音時能更準確。換言之，學習者母語中的特定音素的感知敏感性並不能幫助他們在第二語言聽力感知時輕鬆地使用該母語能力。這表明學習第二語言時「普遍文法」的影響。而使用聲門停止音確實可能是區分字段任務時最普遍及易用的音素手段。

Previous studies on word-boundary perception in English have reported a preference for the use of the prevocalic glottal stop cue (e.g., ‘seen [ʔ]ice’ vs. ‘see nice’) over word-initial aspiration cue (e.g., ‘keeps [th]alking’ vs. ‘keep s[t]alking’) both by native speakers (Nakatani and Dukes 1977) and by L2 learners of various L1 backgrounds (Spanish: Altenberg 2005; Japanese: Ito and Strange 2009; French: Shoemaker 2014; Arabic: Alammar 2016). This study investigates how such phenomenon may apply in the case of Mandarin speakers, whose L1 uses stop aspiration, but not a glottal stop, contrastively. The question is whether their sensitivity to stop aspiration would help them use the cue in L2 word-boundary segmentation. The results showed that Mandarin speakers identified word boundaries more accurately when the stimuli had glottal stops than when they had aspiration stops. This outcome suggests that perceptual sensitivity to a particular acoustic cue in learners’ L1 does not help them to use the cue readily in L2 perception. Both L1 and L2 groups performed significantly better with the glottal stop cue than with the aspiration cue, suggesting that the glottal stop may indeed be a universally unmarked acoustic cue for use in the task.