Learning Mandarin as first language: The speech production of Mandarin plosive consonants by bilingual Sino-KDMs / Chai Chee Wah

The Sino-KDMs are the descendants of Sabah's ethnic minority, the aborigines who intermarried with the Chinese. They make up majority of Chinese primary school nowadays and learn Mandarin as a first language without discrimination compared to the Mandarin native speaker. Phonologically, short-lag and long-lag VOT plosive are distinct phonemes in Mandarin, while both are realizations of voiceless plosive in Malay. All measurements were based on second syllable extracted from manuscript reading recordings. Results revealed that the Sino-KDMs displayed three different patterns of plosive consonants: 1. Commonly confused between aspirated and unaspirated consonants from a set of place of articulation; 2. Frequently produced [x] in aspirated plosive consonants; 3. Bilabial plosive consonants [p] and [ph] are the most form of errors.