Influences of vowels on perception of nasal codas in Mandarin for Japanese learners and Chinese

This paper aims at studying on perceptual influences from vowel segments on the judgments of alveolar/velar nasals by Chinese and Japanese subjects, through two experiments: a) perception of the natural syllables; b) perception of the synthesized syllables. The results show that: 1) The nasalized vowels play dominating roles in cueing Chinese subjects to judge which coda the nasal is, whereas they have few effects for Japanese subjects, especially for the discrimination between an and ang. 2) When the nasalized vowel portions are missing, the vowel nuclei lay similar influences on the perceptions for both Chinese and Japanese. The larger the acoustic differences between the vowel nuclei are for the pair of alveolar/velar ones, the easier it is for both Chinese and Japanese to correctly distinguish them. From these results, we suggest that the importance of the acoustic differences between vowel portions in the pair of alveolar/velar nasals, and the sensitivity to the nasalized vowels, should be highlighted in the learning of Chinese as a second language by Japanese students.