An Experimental Study On Errors In 3+3+3 Tone Sandhi Of Tri-syllable Of Mandarin Produced By Overseas Indonesian Students Of Chinese Origin

In this paper, the author has studied the acquisition of 3+3+3 Tone Sandhi of tri-syllable of Mandarin of Overseas Indonesian Students of Chinese Origin by two experiments, and provided suggestions on teaching Chinese as a second language.The conclusion of the first experiment in which the overseas Indonesian students of Chinese origin was asked to mark tones includes three parts. First, according to the syllable pattern and the degree of difficulty, it can be ordered type1+1+1+1>type 2+1>type 1+2. Second, according to error rate of each syllable in different positions, it can be ranked the first character> the second one > the last one. There is no obvious difference betweent the error rate of the first one and that of the second one, but both are much higher than that of the last one. The syllable pattern and the grammar structure have different influence on the error rate order. Third, the main error type of each character is the confusion of the second tone and the third tone, while the high frequency error types of the tri-syllable are 333, 323, 233, 223, 232.The second experiment is a comparative reading experiment in which both the Chinese students and the Indonesian students who were mentioned before were asked to read the material. The conclusion consists of four parts. First, the same tone sandhi pattern has different syllable types and grammar structures. Second, the pitch vale of tone of the start point, the salient point, the end point and the salient time of the Indonesian students are different with that of Chinese students based on gender, tone sandhi pattern, and the position of the syllable. Third, as to the steady tone process, in the view of gender, the female’s acquisition of tone sadhi of tri-syllable of Mandarin is much better than that of the male; according to the acquisition of the character in different positions, it can be ordered the last character>the second character>the first character; from the perspective of sadhi pattern, the acquisition of type 223 is much better. Forth, as for duration of the tone, both the male and female are different with that of Chinese students on each position.