Perception and Production of Mandarin Monosyllabic Tones by Amdo Tibetan College Students

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to research the error patterns of production and perception of Mandarin monosyllabic tone by college students from Amdo Tibetan agricultural and pastoral areas, and make the analysis of the causes of acoustics in both errors. We do the work through the two experiments of perception and production of tone. We use the methods of combining the speech engineering and experimental phonetics. Results show that the error rate of tone perception is highly correlated [r = 0.92] with that of tone production. The level of Mandarin in Amdo Tibetan agricultural area is higher than that in pastoral area both in terms of tone perception and production. The hierarchy of difficulty for the four grades in agricultural area is as follows: sophomore > freshman > junior > senior, pastoral area is as follows: freshman > sophomore > junior > senior. The hierarchy of difficulty for the four tones both in agricultural and pastoral areas is as follows: Tone 2 > Tone 3 > Tone 1 > Tone 4. Tone 2 and 3 are most likely to be confused. There is no obvious tone shape bias of the four tones, but the tone domain is narrow and the location of the tone domain is lower than standard Mandarin both in agriculture and pastoral areas.