视觉信息与辅音感知

Native speakers (NSs) of certain southern dialects of Modern Chinese, e.g., Cantonese, have been reported to have difficulty in learning the contrast of/1/and/n/in English or Putong- hua. Intensive short-term audio training could only moderately improve the identification ability of these learners. This study investigates whether visual information will facilitate such perceptual process. Effects of visual articulatory cues in perception of places of articulation have attracted much attention, but little attention has been drawn on the effect in perceiving manners, except for the cont- arst between/r/ and/1/ in English. As/1/ and/n/ share the same place of articulation, it has been assumed that visually noticeable difference is minimal between the two. Our analysis on video record- ing of/1/ and /n/ production by native English speakers, however, reveals visual differences in ad- vancement of tongue tips. Our research then testfies the effects of such visual cues in the identification of the non-native contrast by Cantonese learners of English. Results show that the addition of rela- tively more distinct visual information can help Cantonese speakers better perceive the two sounds in certain contexts, but perception under a single modal remains poor.