Coda Nasal Perception in Mandarin by Fuqing Min Speakers

Mandarin has two coda nasals— alveolar /n/ and velar /ŋ/ whereas Fuqing dialect of Eastern Min has only one coda nasal phoneme /ŋ/. This study investigates the effects of pre-nasal vowel, background noise and listeners' age on the coda nasal perception in L2 Mandarin by L1 Fuqing Min speakers for insight into sound change of coda nasals in Chinese varieties and dialects. The results reveal that the younger generation of Fuqing speakers identified Mandarin coda nasals more accurately than the middle-aged generation. High vowel resulted in more misidentifications of post-vocalic nasals than mid and low vowels but it was confounded with nasal type and age group. Background noise did not impact with the identification of nasal place of articulation in Mandarin by Fuqing Min speakers.