The Study On The Relationship Of Tone And Intonation Of Mandarin Between Chinese And American Students

Since Mr. Chao raised the "overlay view" of tone, many experts and scholars had a deep discussion on the relations of tone and intonation, and got a series of research results. They all agreed that the vast majority of Mandarin tone is determined by the tone of the sentence at the end of the word. At the same time,besides the end of the word tone plays a decisive role, there are some other factors or performance. These results have a great effect for understanding and deepen the relations of tone and intonation.But in these many of the outcomes, We find that there has a lot of differences on the relations of the tone of end word and the intonation. These differences primarily relate sentence at the end of the word tone is affected by what means, and what other factors differ etc. To solve these problems, we take the method of experimental study in this paper, get the natural language pronunciation sample, to have a deep study and discussion on there lations of tone and intonation of declarative and interrogative sentence which are pronounced by Sino and US students. Meanwhile, in order to further demonstrate relationship between the tone of the end word and intonation, we also designed an experiment in listening, Let the Chinese native speakers to listen and distinguish the experimental samples, then analysis the results of listening. At last, we want to find out what factors influence the tone of the judge. Thus it will achieve that the test samples come from natural and oral language, and the back to the natural language. It can make results have high authenticity and credibility.Through the first experiment, we found the relations between the tone of end word and the intonation are as follow:Firstly, there is the consecutive superposition of the tone of the end word or a steady stage of the high curve of the tone of the end word in the interrogative sentence without modal particle"吗 ", which is absent in the interrogative sentence with "吗" and declarativesentence. Secondly, the tone of the end word of the interrogative sentence without "吗" is the highest, then is the interrogative sentence without "吗", and the lowest is declarative sentence. Meanwhile, the tone of end word in interrogative sentence and declarative sentence is totally different. However, there is little difference between the tone of end word in the interrogative sentence with "吗" and the interrogative sentence without "吗". Thirdly, in general, the starting height of the interrogative sentence without "吗" is the highest and the declarative sentence is the lowest. Besides, there is little difference between two interrogative sentences. Fourthly, in the tone range, the tone of end word (except level tone) can be ranked from high to low as the interrogative sentence without "吗", declarative sentence, the interrogative sentence with "吗".In the first study we also discovered that there are some differences in the tone of the whole sentence on the condition that the three types of sentences with same tone of the end word:Firstly, in terms of the tone of the last but one word, the interrogative sentence without "吗" has the highest tone and tend to rise and keep steady as well as least slope; secondly, in terms of the starting pitch, the interrogative sentence without "吗" comes higher than the interrogative sentence with "吗", and declarative sentences. Thirdly, in the intonation of the whole sentence, the interrogative sentence with "吗" has the widest range and the interrogative sentence without "吗" has the narrowest range.Compared American learners with native speakers of Chinese, the end word of American learners’sentence in order tone, pitch range, the starting point are less than the height of Chinese native speakers. At the same time, Between the three sentences, the difference of these variables is very small, the difference is not so obvious as Chinese native speakers. And in the end of the sentence transfer type, the interrogative sentence without "吗" has not the highest tone and tend to rise,but sometimes keep steady as well as least slope, in the intonation of the whole sentence, the starting pitch is lower than Chinese native speakers, in terms of the tone of the last but one word of the three sentences,there are no the highest tone and tend to rise or keep steady as well as least slope, the difference between them is very small.In Listening experiments, the United States is listening to learners identified error rate far greater than the Chinese native speakers, and we also comparative the difference between Chinese native speakers who have been listening to the correct sentences and misheard sentences.we found that the sentence which were identified right,the step of tone, the starting point is higher than the height of the sentence which were misheard. Meanwhile, at the end word of sentence tone patterns, the interrogative sentence without "吗" which were misheard has no tend of rise and no keeping steady. At the same time, base on the high identified error rate of American learns, we may say that that the.whether the tail end of the sentence has the rising tone, tone bands, the front-word type of ending word, the starting point of the whole sentence, the last word of the first homology group are all the difference factors between declarative and interrogative.In the end, based on the characteristics of the tone and intonation of American learns, we also give some advices on intonation teaching. That is to say intonation teaching should not only focus on the end word tone, we also should give attentions to the word before the end word, the first word of the sentence.At the same time, it will be easier and clear to see the intonation from the view of sound pattern.