Perception precedes production in native Mandarin speakers of English

Nonnative accents are commonplace, but why? Ample research shows that perceptual representations of second-language speakers are shaped by their first language. But is production also affected? If perceptual representations perfectly control motor production, then second-language speakers should understand their own speech accurately. To test this, we recorded 48 native Mandarin speakers labeling pictures in English. We then played back their own recorded productions (e.g., “lock”) as they chose one of four pictures (lock, log, shape, and ship). They also heard a paired native English speaker. Words contained contrasts challenging for Mandarin speakers, principally coda voicing (lock, log) and similar-vowel (shape, ship) pairs. Listeners achieved 89% accuracy on both their own productions and native speakers,’ suggesting good matching between perception and production. However, errors were unevenly distributed: Mandarin speakers heard their own voiced codas (log) as voiceless (lock) more often than the reverse (10% vs. 5%, p = 0.002). This mirrors a similar but larger voiceless bias in native-English listeners hearing accented stimuli, suggesting that Mandarin speakers’ coda voicing perception is more nativelike than their production. Ongoing work attempts to differentiate interlanguage intelligibility effects from learning of idiosyncratic speech patterns, and we are exploring which acoustic features predict recognition.Nonnative accents are commonplace, but why? Ample research shows that perceptual representations of second-language speakers are shaped by their first language. But is production also affected? If perceptual representations perfectly control motor production, then second-language speakers should understand their own speech accurately. To test this, we recorded 48 native Mandarin speakers labeling pictures in English. We then played back their own recorded productions (e.g., “lock”) as they chose one of four pictures (lock, log, shape, and ship). They also heard a paired native English speaker. Words contained contrasts challenging for Mandarin speakers, principally coda voicing (lock, log) and similar-vowel (shape, ship) pairs. Listeners achieved 89% accuracy on both their own productions and native speakers,’ suggesting good matching between perception and production. However, errors were unevenly distributed: Mandarin speakers heard their own voiced codas (log) as voiceless (lock) more often than the re...