The Study Of American CFL Learners' Variability In Acquiring Mandarin Third Tone

Variability has been the subject of much debate in recent years in the study of learner interlanguage. This dissertation presented empirical evidence to investigate variability in the performance of third tone by American students of Mandarin. In the study, the thesis attempted to explore how situational context and linguistic context influenced American students' production of third tone, and described the dynamic progress of tone acquisition.The present study is consisted of three parts:Experiment 1: Three different tasks (the reading of monosyllable lists, the reading of disyllable lists and the reading of sentences) were used to elicit data and we found that the use of target-like variant of third tone was used the most frequently when subjects were reading sentences aloud, and less frequently when reading disyllable words, and the least frequently when reading monosyllable characters. There exists the effect of situational context on American students' production of third tone, although the order is opposite to our Hypothesis 1.Experiment 2: It tends to examine how the position of third tone and the four matched tones influenced American students' production of third tone. The result showed American students who had learned Chinese just for one year were progressively more accurate in X+3 than in 3+X. And all the American students of three levels were progressively more accurate when matching the third or the fourth tone than matching the first or the second tone.Experiment 3: Free variation was observed in American students' production of third tone. The result showed as the acquisition level increased, the target-like variants also increased, but the error variants decreased as well as centralizing and regularizing. We found the tone variability was systematic, meanwhile it was nonsystematic.This article also found, for third tone coarticulation, the anticipatory effect is more important at the elementary level of American students' tone acquisition, while the carry-over effect is more important at the advanced level.This article recognized the essence of situational context effect from other angels, and discussed the interaction of linguistic difficulty and situational context effect. The author argued "attention to speech" is only one of factors which effect interlanguage variants. On the base of explanation, this study attempted to provide supplements to "the continuum of interlanguage style" from three other angels.