Difficulties in Perception and Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese Disyllabic Word Tone Acquisition: A Study of Some Japanese University Students

Difficulties in Perception and Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese Disyllabic Word Tone Acquisition: A Study of Some Japanese University Students Yasushi Tsubota Masatake Dantsuji Academic Center for Computing and Media Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies, Kyoto University Studies, Kyoto University Yuting Dong Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Graduate School of Human and Environment Studies, Kyoto University amydyt@gmail.com tsubota@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp mdantsuji@media.kyoto-u.ac.jp Abstract Tonal errors pose a serious problem to Mandarin Chinese learners, making them stumble in their communication. The purpose of this paper is to investigate beginner level Japanese students’ difficulties in the perception and pronunciation of disyllabic words, particularly to find out which combinations of tones these errors mostly occur in. As a result, the errors made by the 10 subjects were mostly found in tonal patterns 1-3, 2-1, 2-3, 3-2 and 4-3 in both perception and pronunciation. Furthermore, by comparing the ratio of tonal errors of initial to final syllables, we can tell that the initial syllables appear more difficult than the final syllables in perception, but in pronunciation this tendency is not found. Moreover, there seems to be some connection between learners’ perception and pronunciation in their acquisition process. 1 Introduction Many Southeast Asian languages are tonal languages including Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is a well-known example of a tonal language, in which each syllable has its own fixed tone, including both high-low distinctions and rising-falling variations. The acoustic characteristics of tones are mainly determined by pitch value. Tones are relatively defined. This so-called “relativity” is the stability of pitch within the pitch range of an individual speaker. In general, learners start learning the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation by practicing monosyllabic words. From educators’ experiences, it seems that learners tend to make fewer errors when they pronounce monosyllabic words. However, one of the most important characteristics of Mandarin Chinese is the collaborative pattern of tones in spontaneous speech, such as the rules of tone sandhi and the patterns of tone combinations. This factor influences learners much more when they pronounce disyllabic words in longer sentences. To improve learners’ tonal pronunciation, Zhu (1997) argues that the teaching of tone combinations ought to focus on disyllabic words. Firstly, almost all combination patterns of monosyllabic words in spontaneous speech are included in disyllabic words. Therefore, disyllabic words could be regarded as the foundation. Secondly, modern Chinese contains a large number of disyllabic words. According to Xian Dai Han Yu Pin Lv Ci Dian, there are only 3751 monosyllabic words, but 22941 disyllabic words that make up 73.63% of the total word number. Practicing disyllabic words could solve most problems with tone combinations. The changes of Chinese tones in connected speech pose a serious problem to learners of Mandarin Chinese. It is also found in classroom settings that Japanese students often stumble in their communication because of their tonal errors. The PACLIC-27 143 Copyright 2013 by Yizhou Lan 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation pages 143－152 purpose of this paper is to investigate beginner level Japanese students’ difficulties …

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