Perception of English codas in various phonological and morphological contexts by Mandarin learners of English

The present study aims to explore how phonological, morphological and prosodic features of an utterance affect perception of English codas by Mandarin listeners. A phoneme detection task was conducted with the word-final target phoneme /s/ appearing utterance-medially or finally in various phonological (consonant cluster vs. singleton) and morphological (plural morpheme vs. coda of a stem word) contexts. The results indicate that the patterns of second language (L2) perception of /s/ are influenced by the utterance position and phonological complexity of the coda and cannot be explained exclusively by presence or absence of plurality in Mandarin.

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