4. Cross-linguistic Influence in Chinese Consonant Acquisition: A Case Study of Pakistani Students from a Third Language Perspective

Abstract

For Pakistani learners of Chinese (with Urdu as their L1 and English as L2), their Chinese acquisition process shows a typical case of third language acquisition (TLA). However, existing research has mainly focused on L3 teaching, while cross-linguistic influence (CLI), especially at the phonetic level, remains under-researched. Moreover, studies targeting Chinese as the target language and particularly concerning Pakistani learners’ phonetic acquisition are still lacking. This study concentrates on Chinese consonants as the main primary focus, examining the transfer effects of Urdu (L1) and English (L2) on the acquisition of Chinese consonants. A range of methodologies were employed: first, a questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain learners’ linguistic background information in English (L2) and Chinese (L3); Second, recorded the participants pronouncing 22 Chinese consonants, collected the audio data, and analyzed their pronunciation accuracy: finally, interviews were made with the some most representative participants to cross-check the results of the audio data analysis, thereby minimizing the researchers’ subjective preconceptions in data interpretation. The results show that Urdu employs both positive and negative transfer effects on Pakistani learners’ Chinese phonetic acquisition, while the influence of English is mainly negative. The two languages jointly exacerbate negative transfer effects in terms of voicing characteristics; on the other hand, regarding aspiration characteristics, their influences oppose each other, with the positive transfer from Urdu Mitigating the interference from English. Furthermore, the internal similarity within the target language’s phonetic system is also a primary driver of specific confusion-based error