An Assessment of Non-Native Learner’s Chinese Tone Production

Abstract

Speech sounds are perceived categorically and listeners sometimes integrate visual information to identify the speaker’s utterances (Ludden, 2016: 85-123). However, tone is a remarkable system. It could not be seen through physical movement and only the native speakers know how the different pitch affects the meaning of the word (Jain et al 2017: 66-71). This study is about to investigate the tones production of a Burmese speaker. After the total of 30 hours, 3-4 hours a week, of instruction and practice, the learner who performed the best in perception was assigned to produce the continuum utterance by reading 4 passages aloud. The voice recording was made. 15 Chinese native speakers were invited to rate the accuracy of tones of 242 syllables made by the informant. There are 182 syllables which were rated as correct. The inter-rater agreement, calculated by Kappa, is 0.66. The falling tone syllables got the highest percentage of accuracy while the rising tone got the lowest. The accuracy rate of each tone supports the Tonal Markedness Scale of Zhang (2002, 2004: 157-190) that falling tone is less marked than the rising tone. Furthermore, the familiarity of falling tone which exists in the informant’s mother tongue also plays an important role in production.