An Experimental Study On Chinese Single Tones Among Peruvian Mid-level Chinese Learners

For foreign Chinese learners,the perception of Mandarin Chinese tones voice has always been a difficult task.Its unique distinctive function is extremely important,which has created difficulties of various levels for foreign Chinese learners.This paper took the Peruvian mid-level Chinese learners as the research objects.Through the experimental phonetics,this paper observed their perception of Mandarin Chinese single tones.First,from the pitch and the durational perspective,this paper used the data and phonetic map collected from Praat software to describe the acoustic features of the single tones of these Chinese learners and compared their tonal patterns with Beijing Mandarin.Second,this paper conducted an identification experiment based on the previous data to analyze their perception model of Mandarin Chinese.Then the R language was used to examine the factors and the ways influencing their Chinese tones.In the end,the corresponding teaching strategies and suggestions were given according to the result of the comparison and the above-mentioned factors.We found that for the Spanish-speaking Peruvian mid-level Chinese learners,in their perception of Mandarin Chinese tones,Mandarin tone 2 is the difficult part,whose tone shape is too similar to Mandarin tone 3.That is because they cannot find the turning point of tone 2 correctly.From the perspective of duration,tone 4 is short and heavy.These foreign Chinese learners are affected by the negative transfer of their mother tongue,which means tone 4 is affected by the accent in Spanish.In the identification experiment,it was found that the perception of Chinese tones of the mid-level subjects was categorical and had obvious ability to identify the specific frequency and duration.Finally,in terms of the factors influencing the perception,the subject age,length of language studying,the target language environment and other factors were found to have certain effects.After indexing these effects,their specific impacts and ways can be more clear.