Identification of Vietnamese final stops: Northern dialect speakers' perception of native and non-native stops

This study examined the extent to which speakers' first language (L1) dialect affects the identification of word-final stops which are phonetically unreleased in Vietnamese. Furthermore, a /t/-/k/ merger has been reported for the Southern, but not the Northern dialect. Given this cross-dialectal phonetic difference, we tested the hypothesis that the stops produced by the speakers of the Southern dialect are identified less accurately than those produced by the speakers of the Northern dialect. The results showed that the speakers' dialect influenced the extent to which final stops are accurately identified and, in general, for all five vowels tested the stops spoken by the speakers of the Northern dialect were more accurately identified than those spoken by the speakers of the Southern dialect. However, the accuracy of stop place identification depended on the identity of the preceding vowels.