Title:chinese Phonetic Acquisition By Australian Children As The Second Language

Australia is proud of its multicultural population and has a tradition of multi-language teaching in schools.Chinese is one of the most popular minority community languages and has become increasingly important.To meet the needs of Australian people in Chinese acquisition,the government has added Chinese courses to the curriculum of many public and community schools.As a result,the age of Chinese learners tend to be much younger than before.The study on Australian children's Chinese phonetic acquisition has both academic and practical values.This thesis studies the pronunciation of Australian children acquiring Chinese as the second language.The samples of Australian children's mandarin pronunciation are collected,calculated,measured,plotted and statistically analyzed by Praat and Minispeech Lab software.This thesis presents Australian children's Chinese sound pattern and its development.The studies on the characteristics and trends of Chinese phonetic acquisition provide practical guidance for Australian children's Chinese phonetics teaching.This thesis analyzes the sound patterns(vowel pattern,stop pattern,fricative pattern,tone pattern,etc)of Australian children who are acquiring Chinese as a foreign language whereby the the characteristics of phonetic acquisition are revealed.The study consists of not only static display and analysis,but also description on dynamic traces.The thesis uses the acoustic properties of the vowels to determine the Australian children's Chinese vowel patterns.The Formant chart with coordination of Bark is created to analyze the polymerization,acoustic characteristics,the distribution of the vowel regions and the relationship among them.The findings are as follows:(1)For Australian children,the vowel's triangular pattern[a]-[i]-[u]is usually well acquired more earlier.The pattern of half high vowel[o]is more stable than that of(?);the pattern of apical vowel(?)is more stable than that of(?).[y]has a vowel movement observed during the acquisition.(2)Some vowel pattern distribution is more decentralized than others:1.Compared to the native language,those vowels are more prone to confusions,such as(?).2.Those vowels do not exist in Australian English,such as[y].3.Those vowels tend to cause cognition mistakes leading to tongue position deviation,such as(?).(3)The features of Australian accent are observed in the course of vowel acquisition.For example,the vowels are concentrated in the middle and high levels,and tend to be in the central region;the positions of the tongue tend to be elevated.(4)For the development of children's vowel acquisition,Low vowel[a]is usually acquired earlier than others.As the advance of the acquisition,vowel patterns[i]-[u]gradually develop towards the left and right directions.The pattern of half high vowel[o]is acquired earlier than that of(?);the pattern of apical vowel(?)is also acquired earlier than that of(?).The vowel of[y]usually is acquired last.For consonant acquisition,this thesis studies the stop pattern by analyzing the GAP and VOT starting time.The spectral barycenter G and energy diffusion level D are employed to characterize the fricative pattern.The following findings are presented in the thesis:(1)Significant differences in the aspirated and unaspirated plosive patterns are observed among Australian children for Chinese plosive patterns located in the voiceless area with VOT>0.The Control of aspirated plosive(b[p],d[t],g[k])is more stable than that of unaspirated plosive(p[ph],t[th],k[kh]).(2)The value of GAP is at the upper part of the axis,which reflects the characteristics of the plosive pattern that the muscle is relatively strong and tight during consonant pronunciation.(3)At the beginning of the acquisition of plosive pattern,the distance between the aspirated and unaspirated categories is extraordinarily long.As the progress on Chinese acquisition at middle and high grades,the distance of VOT is gradually narrowed,and close to that of plosive pattern samples collected from Chinese native speakers.(4)In fricative pattern,s[s],x(?),sh(?)are relatively stable,while the order of h[x]and f[f]is gradually adjusted in fricative pattern.It is observed from the graph of D and G values by their size that at the beginning of the acquisition,the friction of[f]is not strong enough and the pronunciation is too soft,h[x]is easily over-stressed which leads to excessive friction.(5)In the acquisition route of fricative pattern,every fricative is gradually adjusted from the upper left corner to the lower right corner,which shows the transition of the fricative from soft to strong.In Chinese tone acquisition,the tone is emulated using the five degree calibration method according to the T value.The tone is analyzed by tone modulation,tone patter and tone value.The sequential order and difficulty levels of Australian children's acuquisition in Chinese tones are derived.(1)The first tone is quite stable,nearly all the groups show 55.The second tone is from25 to 14,15.There are characteristics of Australian high rising tone.The fourth tone is from 41 to 51.The third tone is basically from 212 to 313,314.(2)The first tone is acquired first.And then,the Australia children need to build the concept of rising and falling tones before the acquisition of the third tone.(3)In the tone pattern,the first tone is usually acquired pretty well.The second tone achieves the level of Chinese native speakers,and has characteristics of Australian high rising tone.The fourth tone has a gap compared with the samples of Chinese native speakers at the beginning of the acquisition,and finally improved to the native sample.The progress on the acquisition of the third tone is not easy,which often results in a foreign accent.The route of Chinese tone acquisition is tone 1,tone 2,tone 4,tone 3.This thesis is based on the theory of Interlanguage and Second Language Acquisition whereby the situation of Chinese phonetic acquisition of Australian Children is summarized.Through the study on the course of Australian children's Chinese phonetic acquisition,this research provides practical guidance for the teaching and improvement on Australian children's Chinese phonetic skills.Therefore,different from the traditional error analysis,the novelty of this thesis includes the derivation of Chinese sound pattern and the analysis on the phonetic category of Australian children,which is typologically significant.Moreover,this research contributes to the study of Chinese sound pattern and provides data support to the theorems of language acquisition by revealing the characteristics of sound patterns of Australian children.