The Effect Of Language Proficiency On Uygur Students' Perception Of Chinese Tones And Intonation

Chinese is a tone language. In Chinese, lexical tones and intonation both depend on the variation of pitch. Uygur language, a member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family, is the L1 for Uygur people who live in Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Chinese lexical tones are very difficult to Uygur students, since Uygur is a non-tone language.This thesis presents an experimental study on the perception of lexical tones and sentence intonation (question vs. statement) by 30 Uygur university students and 30 Han Chinese ones in Xinjiang Normal University. The Uygur students are on the different levels of Chinese proficiency, and they are divided into four subgroups according to their grades of HSK: Uygurs of HSK4 (6 listeners), Uygurs of HSK5 (8 listeners), Uygurs of HSK6 (10 listeners) and Uygurs of HSK7 (6 listeners). The experiments are computer controlled. The responses and the reaction time (RT) of each subject are collected and analyzed by SPSS.The results show that Uygur students are poor in identifying Chinese tones, especially Tone 2. However, they are more sensitive to the intonation (question vs. statement) than Han Chinese students. The result provides another evidence for separate representations of lexical tones and sentence intonation. Furthermore, this study proves that Uygur students'Chinese proficiency determines their perception of Chinese tones, and those with low Chinese proficiency often mix up Tone 1 and Tone 2. However, Uygur students remain sensitive to the perception of intonation patterns with the improvement of their Chinese proficiency, and Uygurs with high Chinese proficiency have better perception on the boundary tones than the other three groups. Besides, the individual analysis shows that there is a significant difference among the subjects of HSK4~6, but the Uygurs of HSK7 consistently show great sensitivity to the boundary tones.The investigation on Uygur students'perception of Chinese lexical tones and sentence intonation can shed light on how non-tone speakers acquire a tone language on the aspect of perception and the effects of their Chinese proficiency on the perception of Chinese tones and intonation. This experimental study supplies some help for those Chinese learners whose L1 are non-tone languages. It also provides scientific evidence for language typology and the second language acquisition.