How does native language influence Chinese learners' pronunciation

Native language significantly influences Chinese learners’ pronunciation when acquiring a new language, including English and other languages. This influence is often termed “language transfer,” where phonological features of the native Chinese language affect the pronunciation patterns of learners in the second language.

Key points on how native language affects Chinese learners’ pronunciation:

• Phonological Transfer: Chinese lacks some phonetic features found in languages like English and Korean, such as syllable-final consonants and consecutive consonants between syllables. This leads to frequent errors like omitting final consonants or adding vowels in these positions due to native phonological knowledge influence. ¹

• L1 Negative Transfer: The mother tongue can cause mispronunciations in L2, such as incorrect voicing, articulation place, manner, and vowel qualities. Chinese learners often make pronunciation errors because their native phonemic inventory is different, and they apply Chinese phonetic rules to the target language sounds. ^{2, 3}

• Dialectal Variation: Regional dialects within China can affect pronunciation of English differently. Learners from different Chinese dialect backgrounds exhibit distinct challenges in producing English sounds, intonation, and rhythm, influenced by their dialect’s phonology. ^{4, 5}

• Intonation and Stress Patterns: Chinese tonal and intonation systems differ greatly from stress-timed languages like English. Chinese learners often struggle with producing native-like intonation and stress patterns, which impacts overall pronunciation. ⁶

• Perceptual and Cognitive Limitations: The pronunciation difficulties are compounded by learners’ perceptual challenges in distinguishing and producing unfamiliar sounds due to entrenched native language categories. ^{3, 7}

• Positive and Negative Transfer: While native language transfer often causes negative effects (errors, accent), it can also facilitate learning if learners apply comparable phonological rules from their L1 advantageously. ⁸

In summary, Chinese learners’ pronunciation is strongly shaped by their native phonological system, which leads to specific patterns of errors and challenges in acquiring accurate pronunciation in new languages, especially in sounds, syllable structures, intonation, and stress. ^{1, 2, 3, 6, 8}

References

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• Influence of Negative Transfer of Mother Tongue on Chinese English Learners’ Pronunciation

• L2 learners’ pronunciation of English phonetic sounds

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