ABSTRACT

Certain foreign accents of English are so readily recognized that they have become cultural stereotypes for speakers of American English. One widely stereotyped accent is that of native speakers of Chinese. The central characteristic of the stereotype is the substitution of l and r sounds for each other, as exemplified by alleged pronunciations such as flied lice for ‘fried rice’, and by ethnic jokes targeting such mispronunciations. 1 This stereotype is held not only by laypersons, it also shows up in the literature of second language research. For example, Odlin (1989) groups Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers together as having “frequent pronunciation confusions” of /r/ and /l/. The assumption most often made is that the confusion of /r/ and /l/ arises from the lack of phonemic contrast between [r] and [1] in the native languages.