Abstract
It is a universal tendency that vowels before voiced consonants are longer in duration than those before voiceless ones. Since Mandarin Chinese does not have word-final voicing contrast, it is our interest to investigate whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers are aware of this vowel length effect in English word-final voicing differentiation. In other words, we want to find out whether or not Mandarin Chinese speakers use vowel length as a perceptual cue for word-final voicing judgment. Moreover, we would like to see if the auditory perceptual ability correlates with their English pronunciation proficiency. Hence, both perceptual and production experiments were conducted.In the perceptual experiment, we selected nine minimal pairs of real words which are distinct from each other in word-final voicing. Then the vowels preceding final voiceless obstruents were lengthened and the vowels preceding voiced obstruents were shorten. The subjects were asked to select from two alternatives the one sentence which they thought they heard. In the production experiment, subjects were asked to read a short passage in English and their utterances were recorded onto a tape. Two adult native English speakers were invited to rate and give a mark to each subject’s pronunciation.As a results, we found that there existed a general tendency for subjects to select “voiced” answer while gradually lengthening the vowel length. In addition, significant differences occurred between the perceptual abilities of non-native and native speakers, but no significant differences were found between Mandarin Chinese speakers with various English abilities (i.e., intermediate English learners and advanced English learners). Furthermore, subjects with higher reading scores could better discriminate the voicing feature of postvocalic consonants. That is, the perceptual abilities correlated with subjects’ English pronunciation proficiency.