Lord-rord-nord law-raw-nor Lock-rock-knock lot-rot-not

Picture 1 Labeled spectrum of the word “yet” in PRAAT

3.1.2 Participants

32 Chinese undergraduates from Jiangsu University of Science and Technology participate in the perception experiment. The students are pided into two groups according to their dialects: The first group includes 16 students who are able to clearly distinguish between the Chinese consonants /n/ /l/ and /r/; the second group consists of  16 students who can’t distinguish these three consonants.

Their ages range from 20 to 23 (M=21.9 years old). Chinese learners are pided into two groups according to their dialects: The G1 includes 16 students (8 males and 8 females) who are able to clearly distinguish between the Chinese consonants /n/ /l/ and /r/; The G2 consist of 16 students (8 males and 8 females) who can’t distinguish these consonants. After 9 to 13 years English learning, all these participants above with no experience in studying abroad have been qualified to take CET4. However, due to some unavoidable subjective and objective factors of the participants and experimental devices, only 22 sets of final data (11 sets from both G1 and G2) are valid.