Wuxi Speakers' Production and Perception of Coda Nasals in Mandarin

Wuxi natives speak a dialect of Wu, which has only one coda nasal /n/ but allows allophones depending on the pre-nasal vowel [1], whereas in Mandarin, there are two coda nasals— alveolar /n/ and velar /ŋ/. Two perception experiments were conducted to investigate Wuxi speakers’ perception and production of coda nasals in their second language (L2) Mandarin. First, two groups of Wuxi native speakers, age around 20 and 50, produced monosyllabic words with nasal coda in Mandarin and their production was used as the stimuli for native Mandarin speakers to identify. Second, the same Wuxi speakers participated in an identification task to judge the place of articulation of the nasal coda in monosyllabic words in standard Mandarin. The results of the first experiment indicate that young Wuxi speakers’ Mandarin production was identified with higher accuracy by native Mandarin speakers than older Wuxi speakers’, suggesting the young speakers produced more nativelike Mandarin than the older speakers. The results of the second experiment reveal that young Wuxi speakers identified coda nasals in Mandarin more accurately than older Wuxi speakers did, suggesting Wuxi speakers’ production of Mandarin coda nasals is associated with their perception.