Experiments And Researches Of Chinese Disyllabic Tonal Phonetics Among Korean Students

This thesis takes 8 Korean students of medium level Chinese as subjects of investigation. Based on acoustic experiment, the thesis uses Praat as the speech sound software to inspect the acoustic features and error performances of Chinese disyllables among Korean students. According to analysis results, several practical and efficient teaching strategies and suggestions are proposed for addressing these pronunciation challenges. The thesis is divided into six parts.The first part is the background and motivation for writing this thesis, and literature review from two aspects: error analysis and teaching strategy.The second part is the experimental design. It introduces the experimental subjects, the experimental words, the experimental procedures and the methods of data processing.The third part is the analysis of tone pattern. According to the experimental data,acoustic description and analysis are carried on tone pattern. Results show that:(1) the errors made by male is higher than female, especially in the latter second tone;(2) the pattern between the latter second tone and the latter third tone is very similar;(3) the co-articulation is existed in the first tone of the group 1+1 and 1+4, the front first tone is dropped slightly, because its pitch characteristic is partially moved to the starting point of the latter tone.The fourth part is the analysis of pitch range. Pitch range is what the maximum pitch minus the minimum pitch, and then we compare the Korean students’ pitch range with the Chinese speakers’. The results indicate that:(1) the maximum pitch of Korean students is lower than Chinese and the minimum pitch is higher than Chinese;(2) the pitch range is narrower than Chinese.The fifth part is the analysis of tone value. Tone value is drawn by the fundamental frequency data which is normalized by Z-score(LZ) method. It is concluded that:(1) the starting tone value of the front fourth tone is not high enough and the finishing tone value of the latter fourth tone is not low enough;(2) the tone value of the first tone in the group 1+1 and 1+4 is similar to the fourth tone, besides, the starting and finishing tone value of the first tone are not high enough;(3) the starting and finishing tone value of the second tone in the group 2+1 and2+4 are not high enough, and the tone value of the latter second tone is similar to the third tone;(4) the tone value of the latter third tone is largely in line with Mandarin, but the front third tone is still pronounced as the original one, which shows that Korean students lack the awareness of third tone sandhi;(5) the second tone and the third tone are highly confused, especially in the latter one.In the sixth part of the thesis, some practical teaching strategies and suggestions are proposed for addressing these pronunciation challenges from the aspects of microscopic and macroscopic view. From the micro perspective, specific teaching strategies are proposed for each tone; From the macro perspective, three practical teaching suggestions are proposed: strengthen pronunciation training, use the speech sound software to assist teaching and increase teaching resources.