Paper Abstract

Why does a good mastery of the Mandarin tone system seem to be beyond the reach of so many American learners? The common stand is to attribute the problem to the interlanguage interference from the English intonation.

However, previous studies among American adult learners seem to have some limitations. First, almost all the tests used in the studies have been tonal production tests and seldom have accompanying perception tests been used. Second, in analysis of tonal production, errors used as data are typically collected by having students read aloud a familiar lesson or a number of specifically-designed sentences. No natural speech is reported to have been used as data in published literature. Third, in order to avoid or reduce interaction of various factors, analysis has generally been restricted to syllables at a certain position in the utterance. Even when a whole sentence is examined, every tone is treated as if it were occurring by itself regardless of its context in the sequence. Thus, discussion largely remains syllabic, focusing on isolated tones. There is little possibility of identifying and analyzing systematic sequential patterns in the learner's interlanguage. It is hard to imagine that conclusions drawn within these limitations could be comprehensive enough.

To collect data from learners' elicited speech and analyze their tonal errors as sequences seems to help reveal the genuine and complete picture of the acquisition of Mandarin tones by American native speakers of English. This study has tentatively identified two tonal sequential patterns in American learners' interlanguage, which are characteristic of level tones that do not exist in standard Mandarin and contour tones that do not realize their full values. Both occur as a result of interference from the English prosodic features. Learners' oral production does not seem to correlate with their performance in tonal perception tasks, possibly because production errors result in tonal utterances that are largely incomparable with the standard Mandarin tones, and therefore, the perception test does not relate to them at all.

--Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, (32) 1: 21-39, 1997

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