Korea Putonghua Learners Yangping And Shangsheng Acquisition Voice's Study

With learning Chinese being gaining worldwide popularity, HSK (the national Chinese proficiency test) is being taken by more and more foreigners. As such, it becomes a tendency in Korea to use the scores of HSK to identify learners'Chinese proficiency level. In general, the scores of HSK is an effective index. But with regard to their spoken Chinese, learners'level is different from what HSK scores indicate.For Korean learners, the acquisition of Mandarin lexical tones poses much difficulty, for Korean is not a tone language.The paper focused on the production and perception of Tone 2 and Tone 3 by Korean learners, who were grouped, based on the HSK scores, as Basic, Elementary and Advanced. The research questions were whether HSK scores were related to the acquisition level of tone and whether the level of production and perception of tones were consistent for each group of learners.The paper analyzed with the measurements adopted in experimental phonetics the errors in tone production and perception by Korean learners. First, to identify the acoustic cues for Korean learners'production of Tone 3, perception experiments were conducted with the one-syllable stimuli synthesized with the PSOLA procedure. Secondly, acoustic analyses were made on Korean learners'production, which included pitch-normalized scaling of tone and similarity analysis among different tones. Thirdly, the production by Korean learners and native speakers of one-syllable words and sentence minimal pairs containing two-syllable words was perceived by both Korean learners and native speakers. With these experiments, the study obtained the following results:1. The perception of tone in Mandarin between native speakers and Korean learners is different categorically. The errors in Korean learners'production include an earlier turning point and a higher F0 ending in Tone 3. And for Tone 3, creaky voice is an additional effective acoustic cue, which can be taken as a reference to the acquisition of Tone 3.2. Based on the HSK scores, Korean learners were grouped into three levels, Basic, Elementary and Advanced. Tone 2 and Tone 3 produced by the Korean learners are more similar to each other than Tone 2 and Tone 3 produced by native speakers. And the errors in tonal contour and register in the production of Tone 2 and Tone 3 by the Korean learners are related to some extend to their HSK scores. But the duration patterns of the tones produced by the Korean learners are not related to the HSK scores. This means that the Korean learners have more difficulty with the acquisition of tone durations.3. The grouping based on the accuracy and reaction time in native speakers'perception of the tones bearing on one syllable produced by the Korean learners is consistent with the grouping based on the HSK scores. For one-syllable stimuli, elementary and advanced learners are more consistent in production and perception.4. For the sentence minimal pairs containing two-syllable words bearing Tone 2 and Tone 3 produced by Korean learners, according to native speakers'perception, the lower the HSK scores are, the more chance there is for the percentage of learners'errors higher than 50%, that is, the lower the production level is. Based on the accuracy rate in production or perception of the sentence minimal pairs containing two-syllable words, in terms of the rate lower than 60%, we found that more learners are at the basic level and fewer at the advanced level. The consistency between production and perception is higher among the basic and the advanced learners. For the elementary learners, they have higher accuracy percentage but lower consistency between production and perception. The elementary learners'level is in between the basic and the advanced learners.5. The native speakers'perception of the sentence minimal pairs containing two-syllable words produced by Korean learners reveals that most errors concern the two-syllable words bearing Tone 2 on the first syllable and Tone 4 on the second. And errors also can be seen on the production of the two-syllable words bearing Tone 1 (first) and Tone 3 (second), Tone 2 and Tone 2, Tone 2 and Tone1, Tone 2 and Tone 3. Comparing the production of tone in one-syllable words with that in two-syllable words, more errors are concerning Tone 3 in one-syllable words while in two-syllable words more errors are concerning Tone 2.Based on these results, several suggestions can be offered to the teaching of tone. First, listen more and imitate more, and pay more attention to the tonal contour and register. Second, pay more attention to the position of the turning point both for Tone 2 and Tone 3. The turning point of Tone 2 is earlier than that of Tone 3. Third, more importance should be attached to the tonal contour. Tone 2 has a rising contour. Tone 3 has a relatively high F0 beginning and a mid-high F0 ending. Fourth, bear in mind that the durations among the four tones are different, with Tone 3 being the longest. Fifth, be more aware of the difference between the tone on the syllable in one-syllable words and that on the syllable of two-syllable words and of the tone sandhi rule in Mandarin concerning Tone 3 where the first Tone 3 is not a falling-then-rising tone but a falling-only tone. Finally, render a larger rise to Tone 2 in two-syllable words to avoid the perceptual confusioin between Tone 2 and Tone 3.