Cross-linguistic Similarity:The Perception and Production of English Fricatives /z/ and /ð/ by Chinese Learners 

Li Mohan

Foreign Studies College of Hunan Normal University. Changsha China, 410000;

Abstract：In the acquisition of English,many Chinese students may have difficulty in discerning the English fricatives/z/and/ð/.It is challenging for Chinese students to distinguish English fricatives/z/and/ð/from Mandarin consonants,as Mandarin does not possess phonemic equivalents corresponding to these two voiced fricatives.They tend to classify the English fricatives/z/and/ð/as the same or similar Mandarin consonant sounds.For instance,they usually pronounce“zoo”and“though”as the same sound,and“this”is usually pronounced as/zɪs/.Based on PAT,PDT,GFA and production test,this essay is going to research on the perception as well as production of the two English fricatives by Chinese students at different English proficiency to see whether their acquisition of the two English fricatives becomes better with more L2 learning experience,and therefore verifies some theoretical models in the domain of phonetic acquisition research,such as PAM-L2,SLM and L2LP.Meanwhile,xRecorder and Praat will be mainly used as the recording and analyzing software.

Keywords：Cross-linguistic similarity,Speech perception,Speech production,Perceptual Assimilation Model,Speech Learning Model

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