Research On Perception Of Variant Of Tone 3 At Sentence Level

Teaching tones has always been an important and difficult point in the teaching of Chinese phonetics,and the third tone is a major difficulty in the teaching of tones.In the current Phonetics circle,whether the third tone belongs to "low flat" tone or "low down" tone is controversial.Generally speaking,the complete third tone is considered as a boundary tone,and the half third tone is the more common form.In view of the essential characteristics of third tone and the errors of learners,some Chinese teachers and researchers have put forward the teaching strategies of taking the half third tone as the main body of third tone teaching,or teaching the half third tone firstly and then teaching the complete one.In this experiment,Chinese native speakers who have not been trained in professional phonetics are taken as subjects,and phonetic perception software,xPerception,is used to investigate comprehensively the perception of Chinese native speakers on the half third tone at all boundary position,where the complete third tone should be used.The dimensions of the experiment include the perception of basic semantics,the standard degree of pronunciation,the natural degree of pronunciation,and the intonation.Statistical analysis of the data shows that for native speakers of Chinese,the use of half third tone at boundary position should not affect the understanding of semantics,and the perception of phonological features is standard and natural.However,the use of half third tone at the boundary position will affect the Chinese native speakers' judgment of emphasizing.The results of this experiment support the adoption of the strategy of half third tone as the main body of third tone teaching,and provide reference data for the study of the tone teaching part in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.On this basis,it is suggested that a large sample of repetitive teaching experiments should be conducted for Chinese learners of different mother tongues.