A Study Of Perception And Production Of Mandarin Tones By Malaysian Learners

This dissertation is based on the second language acquisition theories, together with the use of instrumental phonetics and language statistics examined the perception and the production of the four Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllabic and bisyllabic tones by Malaysian students. The performance of the listening tasks in both monosyllabic and bisyllabic tones revealed that their errors basically are almost the same, tone4and tone1respectively are the easiest tones to perceive, while tone2and tone3respectively are the most problematic and easily confused. Besides, the results of the production tasks also showed that tone4is the least problematic in both monosyllabic and bisyllabic tones, but the errors of the rest three tones are different in each group. However, the students’errors mostly exhibited on the tonal ranges, not on the tonal patterns. That is, in the monosyllabic tone, the range of tonel is lower, the onset of tone2is a bit lower, the transition point of tone3is a bit higher and the offset of tone4is a bit lower than the native speaker’s production.In the bisyllabic tone, every word is divided into two parts:the front and the latter syllable. Tonel of both syllables are equally lower than the target language, the onset of tone2in the front syllable is a bit lower and the offset of the second one is a bit higher, the mid-falling-tone3is a bit higher, the onset of the rising-tone3(of the front syllable) is a bit lower, but the offset of the latter one rises again after a drop and the offset of tone4of both syllables are a bit lower.Through the analysis of the second language acquisition theories, the students’errors could be caused by (1) Mother tongue’s negative transfer,(2) The environment of learning Chinese and the misleading of the teacher,(3) The cultural effects,(4) The negative transfer of the knowledge of Mandarin tones. Finally, we would like to give some suggestions on teaching monosyllabic and bisyllabic tones:(1) Emphasize the differences of the tone patterns and the tone ranges, and use the tone ranges as the key point of the curriculum,(2) The curriculum should be based on a monosyllabic tone, but also emphasize a bisyllabic tone,(3) Clarify students’errors and combine the tones teaching with the phonetically practice method.