Mandarin has only nasal codas and no voicing contrast. L2 adult learners of English therefore exhibit difficulties in coda production (Flege, et al, 1992), acquiring them in the order: voiceless stops > voiceless fricatives/affricates > nasals/liquids > voiced fricatives/clusters (Hansen, 2001). It is therefore expected that similar patterns would be found in Mandarin-speaking children learning L2 English.

To test this possibility we collection elicited imitations of codas from 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with 6 months exposure to English. All 15 targets were high-frequency, picturable, utterance-final CVC(C) words. Codas were alveolar and spread across the sonority and voicing spectrum (/n/, /t/, /z, s/, /ts/). Prerecorded stimulus sentences were paired with a picture of the target word on a computer monitor, and children were asked to repeat what they heard. Acoustic analysis was used to determine coda presence/absence.

Preliminary results show that children have the most difficulty producing the coda cluster, with either cluster simplification or metathesis (/ts/ à /st/). The stop coda /t/ was most easily produced. Nasals and fricatives were produced with reasonable frequency, although /z/ was typically produced as /s/. These results are consistent with adult L2 studies showing a voicing and cluster but no sonority effect.