Research On Italian Studests' Acquisition Of Mandarin Tones

This thesis inspected the acoustics performance and tone errors made by the Italian students when learning Mandarin. It also explained the reason of them, trying to give some useful advice to tone teaching.This thesis used the Praat speech sound software to analyses the Italian students'performance of F0 and duration; and made a comparison with that of F0 and duration of Mandarin. What's more, it investigated speakers'pronunciation sample and explained the reason of those errors. In order to explain it well, it also used the variety of language theory, interlanguage and Sociallingustic theory which are related to it.The main results of this thesis are as follows:The second tone is the most difficult of the four tones, the third one is the second difficult to it, the first and the fourth ones are of the same difficulty for the Italian students. Their learning ability of Chinese tones was affected by their learning environment, language style, auditory ability, etc. For example, Speakers always read the fourth tone of Chinese more strongly and much shorter than native speakers, that is because they use the stress of their mother tongue to acquire the pitch of the aimed language.Regardless of the theoretically practices and the certain significance, this thesis has also made certain contribution to Italians Chinese intonation teaching research.