The Production of Mandarin Voiceless Sibilant Fricatives by Late CantoneseMandarin Bilinguals: an Acoustic Study

It has been repeatedly suggested that there are L1 interference and gender-related differences in second language acquisition. This study aims to investigate L1 transfer and sex effect on fricative learning by comparing the spectral peak value of the target fricatives /s / and F2 onset of their following vowels produced by late CantoneseMandarin bilinguals and L1 Mandarin speakers. The results indicated that there were significant gender effects in /s/ and / /, yet no significant gender effect in / /. And there were statistically significant differences in /s/ and / /, but no significant differences in / / between the two language groups.