The Experimental And Simulating Studies Of The Mandarin Tones Emergence Process Of CSL Learners Of Nontone Language Background

The mandarin tones are difficult for CSL learners of nontone-language-background. This research studied and simulated the Mandarin tones emergence process of CSL learners of nontone-language-background, based on the emergentism of the complexity adaptive theory. It includes three parts, experimental studies about Mandarin tones emergence process, the construction of the bilingual model, and the simulation of Mandarin tones emergence process.I. Three experiments about Mandarin tones emergence process. Experiment 1 is about the study of the emergence process of tone features. Experiment 2 is about the study of the emergence process of tone categories. Experiment 3 is about the study of the learning effect of tone learning strategies. The findings of experiment 1 and 2 include that the emergence process of Mandarin tones is a dynamic generating process. The interaction between tone features and 4 tones restrict the emergence of Mandarin tones. This research further proved that self-organization is the most important mechanism of tone emergence. The finding of experiment 3 include that learning strategy of different syllables with different tones is better than other learning strategies.II. The construction of the bilingual model. This research constructed growing tree-structured self-organizing feature map, algorithm, and Mandarin tone representation.III. The simulation studies. This research simulated Mandarin tones emergence process, tone categories emergence process, and the learning effect of tone learning strategies. The simulation results are consistent with the experimental results, and presented a dynamic developmental process of Mandarin tones. The research also proved that self-organization is the most important mechanism of the tones emergence.The implications for Mandarin tones-teaching strategies include that tone features teaching, the learning strategy of different syllables with different tones. This research also indicated that tone teaching is a long term process.