Experiments And Analysis Of Spanish-speaking Learners' Acquisition Of Mandarin Tones

In the first place,this study gives a systematical acoustic analysis of features of monosyllabic tone and disyllabic tone acquired by Spanish-speaking learners of Mandarin.With voice analysis software Praat,we made a comparison between Spanish-speaking learners and standard Mandarin.Secondly,base on the experimental data and auditory discrimination,the paper statistically analyze the tone errors of the Spanish-speaking learners,review more about the difficulties and common errors in their Chinese tone's acquisition.Finally we chased down the cause of errors,and then we discussed the pedagogical implications of our findings.We get the conclusion as follows:for the Spanish-speaking learners,the rising tone is the most difficult in acquisition of Chinese tones.The pitch contour of rising tone approach to the falling rising tone of Chinese,and this relates that they couldn't handle the turning point of the rising tone correctly.When it comes to the duration,the performance of the falling tone of Mandarin always be too short and strong.This is because the students are affected by the negative transfer of their mother tongue;they use the accentuated syllable of Spanish to acquire the falling tone of the aimed language.Meanwhile the pitch range of Spanish-speaking learners is narrower than standard Mandarin.Besides,the tone performance of some learners indicates they have difficulties in mastering the tones.Aiming at these principal errors,we gave some advices for tone teaching.The author hopes the result of this paper will give some inspiration toward the teaching to the learners from Spanish-speaking countries,and also hopes that more language enthusiasts will pay attention to the research of teaching tones.