Acoustic Features of Consonants of Standard Chinese and English by Uyghur Native Speakers

In the social environments where Standard Chinese is widely promoted, the acquisition of second language have increasingly been focused on minorities speaking Standard Chinese and English. This study, under the guidance of Speech Learning Model-revised, analyses the error rate and acoustic features extracted in the production of Chinese Dental and Retroflex Sibilants, i.e., /s/, /z/, /ts/, /ts(h)/, /ts/ and /ts(h)/, and English dental fricatives, i.e., /theta/ and /(sic)/, by 10 native Uyghur subjects. The key observations are as follows: all subjects show a tendency of substituting the new sounds in the second language with the acquired sounds in their native language. The error rate and acoustic features are affected by their second language proficiency. The incorrect productions in the second language are mainly caused by the learners' first language, and can be classified into the corresponding categories in their first language. These results confirm the hypotheses of the Speech Learning Model-revised.