A Research On The Acquisition Of Mandarin Tones In Monosyllabic For Learners From Italy

To everyone who is learning Mandarin, Tones acquisition is an important process, but also a hard one. Students of different languages show different performances during their tones acquisition process. However, we know little about the tones acquisition of learners from Italy for lack of researches on it. And there is much to do with the research related to the perception errors of Italian learners’tones. That was why this research was conducted.This paper takes 39 Italian learners studying at the Confucius Institute at the University of Turin as research subjects and obtains 1248 effective tones-marking samples as well as 1152 effective tones-pronunciation samples during recording tests and listening tests. The author aims at:describing and analyzing the general error expressions of learners’tone production and perception; finding out differences of tones acquisition between learners of different levels; discussing the correlation between the production and perception of tone. At the end of paper, the author puts forward some suggestions on local Mandarin (tones) teaching in Italy according to the causes of Italian learners’tones errors.The results show:Italian learners’tone perception error rate is much lower than tone pronunciation error rate; the category of tone perception can be established successfully at the elementary stage. There is not an one-to-one correspondence between Italian learners’ tone perception and production, which is to say, which one acts the leading role, perception or productions, is up to the type of tones.When Italian learners are pronunciating, Tone 3 is the most difficult one to them and "T3â†'2" is the major error type because of the highest error rate. The acquisition sequence of tone pronunciation is T1â†'T4â†'T2â†'T3, while the acquisition sequence of tone perception is T4â†'T3â†'T1â†'T2. Tone 2 is the biggest problem when learners try to distinguish tones and " T2â†'T3 " is the major error type of tone perception. Italian learners trend to read/recognize T1,T3 and T4 as T2; but they trend to read T2 as T1, to recognize T2 as T3. Factors including interlingual transfer, target language rules overgeneralization, cognitive mechanism of phonetic study, learning strategies, tone training strategies and the situation of Italian Mandarin tone teaching may cause tone errors.The error features of Italian learners of different levels vary. In a word, the development of tone errors is a dynamic process. The elementary and intermediate stage is the key period of the development of interlanguage system. Although the development of tone pronunciation and perception attribute to the final development of interlanguage, their development tracks are a little different:the pronunciation error rate will decrease with the improvement of Mandarin, however, the perception one sometimes rebounds for a while when learners step into a higher Mandarin level.