An Analysis Of Mandarin Pronunciation And Errors In Cantonese

Intonation is a very important prosodic feature and it is also one of the difficulties in the second language acquisition. The intonation errors may not only have a side effect on the PSC and HSK, but also could affect the daily communication and personal image. As one of the most important dialects, Cantonese owns its special position. Therefore, the research of Mandarin intonation produced by Cantonese speakers could enrich the theory of intonation of L1 and L2 Mandarin, provide abundant references for speech recognition and synthesis, and give a great guidance for the second language teaching of Mandarin.By the method of contrastive and statistical analysis, the present study compared the tonal combinations in the connected utterances and sentence intonation of L1 Mandarin by 10 native speakers and L2 Mandarin by 10 Cantonese learners, from both acoustic analysis and perceptual experiment.16 sorts of tonal combinations in the same context and three types of sentences (i.e., statement, intonation question, and particle yes/no question) with varying lengths and sentence-final syllable tone were investigated. In contrast of most previous researches which employed imitational corpus without context, the present study adopted elicited speech in a role-play method, by which this corpus was much more authentic and natural. Besides, the methods adopted in the present study, i.e., the contrastive analysis, the statistical analysis and the combination of acoustic analysis and perceptual experiment, made it much more comprehensive and reliable.Experimental results show that:firstly, the pitch range of L2 Mandarin was narrower than that of the L1 Mandarin. Secondly, the pitch level of L2 Mandarin was generally lower than that of L1, and the interrogative intonation of L2 Mandarin was merely as high as the declarative intonation of L1, which leading to a higher proportion of intonations be recognized as declarative for L2 Mandarin than the L1 speakers. Thirdly, in terms of the differences between declarative intonation and interrogative intonation, L1 speakers’ global f0 raisings of intonation questions and particle questions were flatter than those of L2 speakers, especially in long sentences, leading to a lower recognition rate of L2 speakers’ interrogative intonation. Fourthly, in terms of the interaction between sentence-final syllable tone and intonation, the perceptual experiment showed that the recognition rates of the L1 and L2 statement ending with tone2 and intonation question ending with tone4 were fairly low. Acoustic analysis showed that intonation question affected the sentence-final syllable tone. Notably, the tonel and tone4 of L2 intonation questions were more likely to show a successive addition. Finally, in terms of the particle question, the perception experiment shown that the questions of L2 speech where the sentence-final particle-ma0-was cut were more likely to be recognized as the statement than L1, indicating that the L2 Mandarin depended more on the sentence-final particle to express their interrogatives.The present study revealed the characteristics and errors of Mandarin intonation by Cantonese speakers. The results could be applied in the second language teaching, providing abundant reference for speech recognition system and improving the naturalness of synthetical speech.