Paper accepted as a finalist for the Young Scholar Award Competition at the International Conference on Chinese Language Learning and Teaching in the Digital Age, 25-27, November, 2011 1 Towards a Model of Second Language Word Production and Recognition in Mandarin Patrick Chun Kau Chu University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Abstract The production and recognition of Mandarin words by Cantonese speakers are influenced by the pronunciation correspondences between Cantonese and Mandarin in all sublexical levels (i.e., onset, rime and tone). A three-route second language word production and recognition model is proposed using these pronunciation correspondences. A concept route links the concept and the L2 Mandarin phonological representation directly, while a lexical route links the concept and the L2 Mandarin phonological representation through the L1 Cantonese phonological representation. A sublexical route activates the concept and/or the L2 Mandarin phonological representation through the mediation of L1 Cantonese phonological and sublexical representation using Cantonese-Mandarin pronunciation correspondences. Beginning learners of Cantonese mainly use the sublexical route in L2 Mandarin word production and recognition. Advanced learners gradually shift from the sublexical to lexical/concept route in producing Mandarin words while both lexical/conceptual and sublexical routes are still in active use to generate possible word candidates in L2 Mandarin word recognition. Evidence for the proposed model is drawn from a Mandarin word production task, a Mandarin disyllabic word transcription task, a Mandarin pinyin transcription task, and a character-sound matching task. Further testing of the model in the neurolinguistics and computational domain are also proposed. Introduction It is well documented (e.g., Lado, 1967) that second language (L2) speech produced by non-native speakers is influenced by the phonetic, phonological and prosodic system of their first language (L1). For example, Cantonese speakers sometimes mispronounce the English word ‘right’ as ‘white’ due the lack of the phoneme /r/ in their L1. Cantonese-accented Mandarin reveals another kind of negative transfer where accent is realized at the lexical level. There are many homophones in Cantonese and Mandarin, but homophones in Cantonese may not be homophones in Mandarin (e.g., the pair 尾 ‘tail’ and 美 ‘beauty’, are both pronounced mei5 in Cantonese, but wei3 and mei3 in Mandarin respectively; the pair 聲 ‘sound’ and 星 ‘star’ are both pronounced sing1 in Cantonese, but sheng1 and xing1 in Mandarin respectively). It has been mentioned in the Mandarin learning literature that Cantonese speakers may mistakenly think that words that are homophones in Cantonese are also homophones in Mandarin (e.g., Tsang-Cheung, L. Y., 1988, Zeng, 2009). Adapting the Revised Hierarchical Model of bilingual processing (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), Chu and Taft (2010) proposed an L2 Mandarin word production model for Cantonese learners of Mandarin to explain the negative homophonic transfer from L1 Cantonese to L2 Mandarin. The model