The Tone-recognition Study About Bi-syllable Words In Short Sentences For American University Students At Primary Chinese Level

Among all the research about learners who study Chinese as a foreign language, the research of Chinese tones has always taken a remarkable place. However, most of the research was aimed at input rather than output. This thesis is aimed at tonal-input research, which experimented on six American college students, who had only been learning Chinese for one month, to analyze their listening ability of tones, including distincitive features and tone-marking, also to compare the abilities of tonal-input and tonal-output.The experiment was carried out in three steps. First, students were asked to choose the distinctive features of tones for each syllable in each word. Second, students were asked to mark the tones for every syllable. Third, students needed to read ten Chinese words, which were from "one" to " ten", and they were recorded.The experiment data were analyzed from three aspects. The first part is to analyze the data of the distinctive features experiment. The result shows that students recognize the first tone as "high" and "smooth", the second tone as "low", the fourth tone as "high" and "fall", while they cannot clearly recognize the "rise-fall" feature of second tone and third tone. The second part is to analyze the data of tones-marking and compare the results with the first part. As a result, students have a comparatively poor command of tones-marking ability. The second tone and third tone would not only make it hard for students to correctly separate the tones, but also increase the number of categories of incorrect bi-syllable words. Also, it is easier for students to differentiate the tones in the latter part of the word. Besides, SPSS was also used to analyze the most obvious incorrect combinations of some bi-syllable words.The third part is to evaluate the students’ pronunciation with Praat and compare it with the ability of differentiating distinctive features. The data shows that the pronunciation consists with the ability of differentiating distinctive features.In the last part of the thesis, some advice of teaching Chinese tones were offered, that is the traditional tone-marking practice should be combined with the practice of differentiating the distinctive features.To introduce the term " distinctive feature" into the tonal-input experiment is the greatest breakthrough of this thesis.