The Acoustic Experimental Study On The Acquisition Of Neutral Tone By Pakistani Students

As a very important phenomenon in Chinese pronunciation,neutral tone is one of the difficult problems faced by Chinese learners.It is also difficult for international students to acquire neutral tone,which is not only reflected in the flow of speech,but also in the vocabulary of the neutral tone is often "foreign accents".This paper takes 63 pairs of neutral tone which distinguish the meaning as corpus and uses the method of experimental phonetics to conduct acoustic experiments on 6 Pakistani students with advanced Chinese proficiency.The paper yields 2286 sample recordings,3087 pieces of data of neutral tone.And then analyzes the acquisition of neutral tone in terms of pitch,length and intensity.Types of neutral tone errors,explore the causes of errors,and finally put forward effective suggestions for neutral tone teaching.The main conclusions as follows:（1）The acquisition rules of neutral tone of Chinese disyllabic words of Pakistani students with advanced Chinese level are: the neutral tone after Yin Ping and Qu Sheng has been acquired basically,and the neutral tone after Yang Ping occasionally appears mistake,the neutral tone is being acquired.The neutral tone after the Shang Sheng is the most problematic,indicating that the advanced level Pakistani students have not yet learned the neutral tone after the Shang Sheng.（2）Pakistani international students with advanced Chinese proficiency have the largest pitch deviation when learning neutral tone,and the concentrated expression is the uneven tone of neutral tone after the first voice.The neutral tone after speaking is the difficulty for Pakistani students to acquire the neutral tone,and it is also the focus of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.（3）For Pakistani students with advanced Chinese proficiency,the pronunciation error of neutral tone is manifested in that the words after neutral tone are not short enough.Judging from the sound-to-length ratio within the words,the last words of international students’ neutral tone words account for 95% of the preceding words,and only 5% shorter.Judging from the syllable length ratio between word pairs,the number of words following neutrally tones’ words accounts for 65% of the normal syllables,which is greater than the research conclusion of native speakers.The words before the neutral tone are also affected,and they are read shorter than normal syllables.（4）Pakistani students with advanced Chinese proficiency are slightly better at the sound intensity of 0.50 neutral tone.After T test,it can effectively distinguish non-neutral tone and neutral tone.But the volume is larger than the standard deviation,and the pronunciation is very unstable.The amplitude product performance of international students is still unable to distinguish the neutral tone after the Shang Sheng and the neutral tone after the other tones.