To play or to pray?–The influences of initial exposure age and environment on perception of Mandarin speakers of English on devoiced liquids

The devoicing rule of liquids after voiceless aspirated stops presents difficulty for L2 English learners. This study investigates Mandarin speakers’ perception of the rule with regards to initial exposure age and environment. Three initial exposure ages were included in this study: kindergarten, elementary, and junior high school. Except for the last group, each group was further divided into two exposure environments: Taiwan and the U.S. As a result, five groups of people were included in total, resulting in 25 subjects. Stimuli were pseudo-words in an SLV structure, recorded by one native English speaker and one non-native English speaker. Half of the stimuli began with a voiceless stop, and the other half began with a voiced stop. The native speakers pronounced the voiceless liquids accordingly while the non-native speaker only had voiced liquids. Preliminary results showed that, in general, L2 learners took longer time in perceiving devoiced liquids. Listeners who had earlier exposure were more likely to respond faster to native speech while late learners responded better to non-native speech.