A study of the perception of English consonants by Chinese listeners

This study examined the perceptual patterns of Chinese listeners for six English stop-fricative contrasts, based on the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). Chinese listeners participated in both identification and AX discrimination tasks. Four contrasts was identified as two-category (TC), while two were identified as uncategorized-categorized (UC). The results showed that Chinese listeners showed good discrimination accuracy for both TC and UC contrasts, with two exceptions where identification overlap were observed, supporting the PAM hypothesis. Within both TC and UC contrasts, discrimination accuracy differed depending on the presence or absence of identification overlap. These findings suggest that both identification patterns and the listeners' native language influence the discriminability of non-native consonant contrasts. The results are discussed in terms of the relationship between identification patterns and discrimination accuracy.