French and Russian students’ production of Mandarin tones

French and Russian students’ production of Mandarin tones Dr Felicia Zhang Chinese Culture University Email: feliciazhang8381@gmail.com Abstract This paper discusses the tone acquisition of Chinese by students in the context of Indo- European languages. This paper conducted two experiments: (1) Using Zhang (2006)'s ‘Somatically-Enhanced Approach’(SEA) to conduct small-scale teaching experiments to the effectiveness of SEA on error correction of intermediate French and Russian students. "Somatically-Enhanced Approach" is centered on the body, teaching through humming, clapping, rhythm and movement to increase learners' sensitivity to tone and rhythm through language rhythm. The data in this thesis comes from the output of a Chinese class oral test of six French and Russian exchange students in a private university in Taiwan. (2) In the second experiment, all the spoken language corpus of French and Russian students were provided to ten native speaking Chinese teachers for analysis. After a one-semester study of the "Somatically-Enhanced Approach" in this research, Russian students and French students demonstrated that they could correctly pronounce the correct tones when speaking Chinese, with enhanced fluency in natural speech. The results of this study will be presented through quantitative (statistical data) and visualization and Praat was used to analyze the collected classroom spoken data and explore the sources of the errors. Keywords: tone analysis, French and Russian students, interlanguage, Somatically-Enhanced- Approach. 1. Introduction Tone is an important feature for distinguishing meaning in Chinese, and it is also one of the evaluation criteria for the accuracy of Chinese pronunciation. Chao (1930) also pointed out that Chinese tones have a distinguishing function, and the accurate mastery of Chinese tones can eliminate ambiguity and communicate effectively. Tones are supra-segmental components attached to syllables which are realized in pitch. To depict tones graphically to facilitate understanding, in Chinese language teaching the "Tone letter system" designed by Chao (1930) is usually adopted. The 32nd Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2020) Taipei, Taiwan, September 24–26, 2020. The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 260 Figure 1: A system of tone letters In Figure 1, the vertical axis represents a person’s voice range which can be divided into five equal levels represented by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Among them, 1 means the lowest, 2 means the second lowest, 3 means the 3rd highest, 4 means the second highest, and 5 means the highest level of pitch. 葉德明 (2005) pointed out that tones are realized by the pitch of speech which is determined by the frequency of the sound wave. Therefore, the higher the number for frequency, the higher the pitch for the sound, and vice versa. It is related to the number of vocal cord vibrations. The pitch ranges of a person also vary by gender. For instance, for males, it is roughly between 100 and 200 Hz, while for females, it is roughly between 150 and 300 Hz. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, five if neutral tone is included. Using Figure 1 as an illustration, Tone 1is represented as 55, …

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