Experimental Study Of Turkmenistan's Foreign Students' Word Tone Acquisition

Employing traditional perception experiment and acoustic experiment of experimental phonetics, this paper will have a systematic analysis on monosyllabic tone acquisition of eight Turkmenistan students, to explore the acquisition rules and to discuss their error types. Corresponding teaching strategies will be given at last. This paper can be divided into five parts.The first part is the Introduction. It introduces the purpose and significance of the research, and the status quo both at home and abroad.The second part is the Experiment design. It introduces participants, word table design, and experimental procedure.The third part is the Perception experiment, which is carried out from two perspectives--Turkmenistan students listening to native speakers'pronunciation and native speakers listening to Turkmenistan students'pronunciation. It tries to explore the relationship between input and output of monosyllabic tone acquisition of Turkmenistan students. Results show that:first, the difficult sequence of monosyllabic tone in listening is the same as in reading. The sequence is as follows: the rising tone, the level tone, the falling-rising tone, the falling tone; second, the listening error types are consistent with the reading error types in performance; third, the confusion types in listening are mainly the same as reading. It is obvious that there exists a high correlation between the input and output of monosyllabic tone acquisition among Turkmenistan students.The fourth part is the Acoustic experiment. Through acoustic experiment of experimental phonetics, a systematic acoustic description and analysis will be carried out on the characteristics of monosyllabic tone acquisition among Turkmenistan students. First, Praat will be used to measure the voice data. Then, statistical tools will be employed to analyze the experimental data. The normalization will be employed to analyze frequency value and T test will be employed to analyze LZ value and tone duration. The experimental results show that:first, the pitch range of Turkmenistan students is narrow; second, tone type and tone pitch have the same difficulty sequence with the perception experiment. The sequence is as follows:the rising tone, the level tone, the falling-rising tone, the falling tone; third, the difficulty sequence of the tone duration is as follows:the falling tone, the level tone, the rising tone and the falling-rising tone. It is obvious that Turkmenistan students'mistakes in monosyllabic tone acquisition are from the following four aspects--pitch range, tone types, tone pitch and tone duration.The fifth part is the Corresponding teaching strategies. Based on the results of perception experiment and acoustic experiment and two years'teaching experience, this part will put foward four ways of improving teaching methods of tone and four ways of improving learning methods of tone.