| Summary: | 博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === This dissertation consists of two individual studies, SLIP and SLA, each of which investigates whether the unmarkedness effect plays a crucial role in shaping Mandarin slips and Taiwanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners’ English production in regard to coda nasals.
SLIP concerns the study of the slips of coda nasals in Mandarin made by Mandarin, Southern Min, and Hakka speakers. The study is further divided into two parts in terms of data sources, one from natural speech and the other from experimentally elicited speech. The natural data contain 603 slips in Mandarin, all of which are related to coda nasals. As to the elicitation experiment, 114 subjects participated, each of whom read 346 test materials with target coda nasals.
SLA (Second Language Acquisition) is related to the study of the production of English coda nasals by Mandarin speakers, Southern Min speakers, and bilinguals in Mandarin and Southern Min. Ninety-nine participants took part in this study. Each participant read 153 test sentences with target coda nasals.
There are several major findings in the two studies: (1) in the SLIP study, Southern Min and Hakka speakers have more difficulty with the /waN/ sequence than Mandarin speakers, suggesting the transfer of L1 segmental co-occurrence restrictions to L2; (2) in the SLIP study, Southern Min speakers made the most errors in relation to coda nasals, followed by Mandarin speakers; Hakka speakers made the least errors, partly because the difference in sound systems between Mandarin and Southern Min is greater than that between Mandarin and Hakka; (3) the SLIP study shows that the distant assimilation and dissimilation are important factors in constraining Mandarin slips of coda nasals; (4) based on markedness diagnostics (e.g., the assimilation diagnostic), the SLIP study manifests coronal /n/ as the unmarked nasal in the coda position in Mandarin, which in turn discloses the emergence of the unmarkedness effect in Mandarin slips; (5) in the SLA study, Southern Min speakers have less difficulty with English /m/ than Mandarin speakers do, suggesting the positive transfer of L1 phonemic system to L2; (6) the SLA study shows that coda nasals in the sentence-initial position suffer less from the substitution of sounds than those in the non-initial position, suggesting the influence of the positional effect on SLA; (7) both of the studies show a strong tendency toward unmarked [n] in codas found in each language group, revealing that an unmarkedness effect plays a leading role in shaping Mandarin slips and the production of interlanguage English; and (8) Optimality Theory (OT) can pinpoint the correlation among the effects and reveals their common output goal—avoidance of dorsal /N/ from surfacing—by using a Place markedness hierarchy, *DORSAL >> *CORONAL.
The results obtained in the two studies contribute to other studies on slips and SLA in at least three aspects. First of all, the unmarkedness effect is recognized in Mandarin slip patterns and Taiwanese EFL learners’ English error patterns in coda nasals. Second, these results unveil the active interplay between the transfer and unmarkedness effects in slips of the tongue and SLA from the perspective of OT, an output-based model. Third, the SLIP study discloses the dynamic interaction among different effects like the Place assimilation and the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) by using the OT model. For future research, I hope that these results will draw not only SLA researchers’ attention, but also phonologists’ attention to the role of the unmarkedness effect in slips and SLA as well as the correlation between various effects.
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