The Contributions of Initials and Finals to L2 Chinese Comprehensibility Based on Functional Load Principle

The current study set out to investigate the relative contributions of Initials and Finals to Chinese L2 comprehensibility based on Brown's functional load (FL) principle. 75 speech samples elicited from 20 Urdu-speaking learners of Chinese were subjectively rated by native speakers of Chinese for comprehensibility scores, and then the segmental errors were analyzed based on FL principle. The experimental results showed that the ratio of segment errors with high FL has stronger correlation with comprehensibility than those with low FL, and the ratio of Final errors showed stronger correlation with comprehensibility than that of Initial errors, suggesting that segmental errors with high FL inhibit comprehension more than low FL errors, and Finals are more important for successful comprehension than Initials. This study offers: (1) the adaptation of Brown's FL principle on Chinese, (2) an empirical evidence that Final is a more important constituent than Initial in speech comprehension, (3) re-examination of the stronger impact of high FL errors than low FL errors on comprehensibility.