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Chapter 10 - Production of Mandarin Tones by L1-Spanish Early Learners in a Classroom Setting

from Part III - Acquiring Suprasegmental Features

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2021

By
Lucrecia Rallo Fabra ,
Xialin Liu ,
Si Chen  and
Ratree Wayland
Edited by
Ratree Wayland
Ratree Wayland
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

This study investigated the production of the four Mandarin tones by a group of school-aged Spanish learners of Chinese (n=12) and a group of native Chinese children (n=4) with a mean age of 9.5 years. The participants were recorded in a quiet room at the school premises while performing an imitation task in which they produced 32 monosyllabic words embedded in a carrier phrase. Time-normalized pitch contours were extracted at 20 consecutive points, converted to logarithmic Z-scores to normalize F0 variation across talkers and submitted to growth curve analysis to compare the surface F0 contours of the four tones. A significant difference in the F0 shapes produced by the two groups was found for all four tones, but a significant difference in F0 height was found only for Tones 2 and 3. The findings suggested that native-like production of pitch contour may be more challenging than pitch height due to their relatively more complex f0-related laryngeal muscle activities and lesser attention to the former than the latter F0 dimension among non-native tone listeners.

Keywords

MandarinTonesL1SpanishChildrenProductionClassroomSecondLanguage
Type
Chapter
Information
Second Language Speech Learning
Theoretical and Empirical Progress
 , pp. 273 - 289
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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