First Advisor

Carolyn Quam

Date of Award

Spring 6-15-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Biology and University Honors

Department

Biology

Language

English

DOI

10.15760/honors.1573

Abstract

This line of research investigates attrition of native language (L1) Mandarin proficiency with increasing proficiency in English. English uses pitch to denote intonation (e.g., "it's there?" versus "it's there!"), while Mandarin additionally uses pitch to indicate word meanings; e.g., /he/ means "drink" when spoken with a high, level tone, or "river" when spoken with a rising tone. The present study delineates between two alternative explanations for the prior finding that English proficiency correlates with attrition of Mandarin tones, but not Mandarin vowels. This pattern could be explained by 1) assimilability of the Mandarin vowel contrasts used in the study into English categories (L1-L2 Assimilability Hypothesis), or 2) by tone being uniquely prone to attrition regardless of assimilability (Tone-Uniqueness Hypothesis). To distinguish these, participants completed an eye-tracked word-recognition task. They heard a spoken Mandarin word while viewing two images, and selected the image matching that word. The two images represented words differing in tone or vowel. Mandarin vowel contrasts were designed to be 'easy', 'medium', or 'hard' based on their assimilability into English. Preliminary results support the L1-L2 Assimilability Hypothesis, as proficiency in Mandarin is correlated with performance in less-assimilable vowel trials, not just in tone trials.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/42176

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