The Effect of Orthography on L2 Perception Robert Bo Xu, Jingwen Li, Peggy Mok Department of Linguistics and Modern Languaegs, The Chinese University of Hong Kong xuborobert@gmail.com, joanneljw@gmail.com, peggymok@cuhk.edu.hk Abstract Mandarin Chinese has two orthographic systems: Chinese characters and Pinyin. While Pinyin is transparent to Mandarin pronunciation, characters are opaque and seldom relate to sound. This study aims to find out the effect of these two systems on Cantonese listeners who are L2 learners of Mandarin. Native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers participated in word recognition experiments which included a monosyllabic task and a disyllabic task. The results show that Cantonese listeners most often confused T1 and T4, and T2 and T3 in Mandarin. Pinyin and characters have influence on the perception of Cantonese listeners. While Pinyin facilitates the recognition in the monosyllabic task, but characters facilitate the disyllabic task, indicating the two tasks may have involved different processes. Index Terms: L2 perception, orthography, tone, Mandarin 1. Introduction 1.1. Chinese character and Pinyin The primary writing system for modern Chinese is Chinese characters. It is widely used in Chinese communities no matter which Chinese language is mainly spoken in that area. Although there are differences between the simplified and traditional versions of Chinese characters, they share the attribute of being opaque, in the sense that they give little cue to what how the characters should be pronounced. Therefore, several romanization systems were proposed to directly represent the sounds of Mandarin Chinese. The most widely used one among them is Hanyu Pinyin, known as Pinyin for short, designed and promoted by the Chinese government. Pinyin is a transparent system with a one-to-one mapping to the sounds of Mandarin syllables. For example, in the syllable quán in Pinyin, “q” denotes the onset, “uan” denotes the nasal rhyme, and the diacritics above “a” shows that the syllable should be pronounced with Tone 2 (T2), a rising tone. While Chinese characters are the major writing system in everyday life, their opaqueness gives rise to problems in learning. Pinyin, as a result, is introduced at the beginning of Chinese learning for both native and nonnative speakers to assist the acquisition of Mandarin sounds. Some studies have found that orthography played an important role in L2 learning. For instance, it helped the learners to retain the phonological representation of words in their memory [1]; it can also be used to account for the pronunciation difficulties at the sublexical level [2]. However, few studies focus beyond the alphabetic writing systems. Therefore, it is yet to find out whether an opaque system like Chinese characters will have a similar effect to other systems with a letter-to-sound mapping for L2 learners. In particular, tones are poorly represented in Chinese characters. This study will focus on the effect of orthographies of Mandarin Chinese, character and Pinyin, on the perception of tones by Cantonese listeners, to find out if Cantonese L2 learners of Mandarin would have different accesses to the Mandarin lexicon when they are presented with Pinyin or characters. 1.2. Tones in Mandarin and Cantonese Although sharing the same orthographic system in Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese have different phonologies. In terms of lexical tones, Mandarin has a contour tone system, while Cantonese has a more complicated system that differs in both tone contour and tone register. There are four lexical tones in Mandarin [3], shown in Table 1. All of them differ in pitch shape. Tone 1 (T1) is a high level tone. T2 is a high rising tone. T4 is a falling tone. There are two allotones for T3. Produced as a citation form or before a boundary, it is a dipping tone with a rising tail; otherwise it is produced as a low tone [4]. There is a tone sandhi rule in Mandarin. In a T3-T3 sequence, the first T3 is produced as a high rising tone [5], perceptually indistinguishable from T2[6, 7], especially when the linguistic context that implies the occurrence of tone sandhi is lacking [8]. Table 1. Lexical tones in Mandarin. T1 T2 T3 T4 Tone Shape Level Rising Dipping Falling Tone Letter 55 35 21(4) 51 Cantonese has a more complicated tonal system with six lexical tones [9, 10, 11]. As shown in Table 2, they differenti- ate in both pitch shape and pitch register, with three level tones (T1: high level, T3: mid level, T6: low level), two rising tones (T2: high rising, T5: low rising) and one low falling tone (T4). Table 2. Lexical tones in Cantonese. T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 Tone register High High Mid Low Low Low Tone shape Level Rising Level Falling Rising Level Tone Letter 55 25 33 21 23 22 Despite the difference in the tonal system, the two historically related languages have some regular rules of correspondence [12], as shown in Table 3 and Table 4. Table 3 shows the major correspondence of Cantonese tones to Mandarin tones; while Table 4 shows the opposite. Chu [13] has also shown that these sublexical (onset, rhyme, tone) mappings between Mandarin and Cantonese were important to Cantonese speakers’ production and perception of Mandarin, especially for speakers with low proficiency in Mandarin, to whom the concept route (mappings through meanings) was often unavailable. This was evident in the results of his experiments as the production and perception error patterns correlated with the mapping percentages in [12]. ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive 4 th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL-2014) Nijmegen, The Netherlands May 13-16 2014 TAL 2014 75