An Experimental Study on Tone Acquisition of American Intermediate-Chinese Learners

Zhang Danyang 张丹阳

罗德岛大学孔子学院汉语教师张丹阳

论文摘要Paper AbstractThis study aims to find the common features of American Chinese learners in terms of their inadequate acquisition of tones by comparing the tone spectrograms of American Chinese learners with that of native standard Chinese speakers on perspectives of types, length, pitch and range. Chinese learners of grade 3 in URI are chosen as participants. They are supposed to read a word list with both single-tone words and double-tone words. Their reading will be recorded using a recording software. These records will be divided into single word files and each audio file will be presented in a picture generated by Praat. The same procedure will be adopted to standard Chinese speakers to generate the spectrograms of standard Chinese tone. Then compare each learner’s spectrograms with the standard to see if they are different. Our expectation is that the learners’ spectrograms will be different from that of the standard, and there will be common features in learners’ spectrograms, which may associate with their native language.