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Article published In:
Acquisition of Chinese: Bilingualism and Multilingualism
Edited by Boping Yuan and Yanyu Guo
[Journal of Second Language Studies 3:2] 2020
► pp. 180–204

Acoustic analysis of Chinese tone production by Thai-speaking learners of L2 Chinese

| The Education University of Hong Kong
| The Education University of Hong Kong

This article reports on an empirical study of Chinese tone production in various contexts by Thai-speaking learners of L2 Chinese. Comparisons are made between Thai students and Chinese native speakers. The acoustic data are analyzed in terms of pitch register, pitch contour and duration, which show that the main problems of Thai students are: (1) T1 is lower in sentence-mid and sentence-initial positions; (2) T2 is less rising or even exhibits a falling-rising contour at a lower register; (3) T3 cannot approximate a full falling-rising contour in isolated characters and at sentence-final position; (4) T4 is too long and the falling slope is too strong. Our results suggest that Thai students should make efforts in both pitch and rhythm control and pay attention to context variations. It is also suggested that similar research methods can be applied to L2 Chinese learners with different first languages (L1s).

Keywords: tone production, L2 speakers of Chinese, Thai speakers, acoustic analysis, error analysis, pitch, duration
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Chinese lexical tones
    • 1.2Previous studies of Chinese tone error patterns by Thai learners
  • 2.Research method
    • 2.1Design of a reading list
    • 2.2Participants, experiment procedures and recording settings
    • 2.3Acoustic measurement and data conversions
  • 3.Results and discussions
    • 3.1An overview of tone production patterns by both groups
    • 3.2Analyses by context types
    • 3.3Analyses by tone categories
    • 3.4Further discussions
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.19035.zha
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