An Experimental Study On The Pitch Of Boundaries Of Prosodic Words Among Students From Thailand, Indonesia And Korea

Pitch is an important acoustic characteristic of prosodic boundary. With the methods ofexperimental phonetics, this paper investigates the performance of foreign students fromThailand, Indonesia and Korea on their mean pitch, high point, low point, range of pitch ofthe syllable and pitch interval in the boundaries of prosodic words, and compares it to that ofChinese students. Then the error pattern of foreign students from each country and its causesare analyzed respectively. At last, this paper will provide some suggestions on teachingChinese as the second language.We get the conclusion as follows,(1) the mean pitch of foreign students from Thailand,Indonesia and Korea at pre-boundary and post-boundary of the first tone mostly is lower thanthat of Chinese.(2) high point and low point of foreign students is generally lower than that ofChinese; but for the range of pitch of the syllable, it’s complicated relatively.(3) In general,the higher Chinese level is, the smaller error will be. But there are exceptions to the rule.Sometimes the difference of students of intermediate or senior level is bigger.