An investigation of Mandarin tonal errors by Vietnamese learners: With discussion on the correlation between perception, pronunciation and memory = 越南學生華語聽辨、發音、記憶之聲調偏誤及相關性

Abstract

The difficulty and confusion of Vietnamese learners in acquiring Mandarin Tone 1 (Yin Ping) and Tone 4 (Qu Sheng) have long been noticed and discussed. Previous studies have investigated the phenomenon by examining Mandarin tonal errors by Vietnamese learners in perception and pronunciation. While the studies commonly hold that the learners’ pronunciation of Tone 1 and Tone 4 is more serious a problem than their perception of the two tones, some hold the contrary view. Nevertheless, the issue of memory errors in tones is left without being noticed and analyzed in the literature, and it is unobserved if and how much the memory errors influence the survey results. This study, with 25 Vietnamese intermediate-level Mandarin learners as subjects, examined the errors of Mandarin Tone 1 and Tone 4 in monosyllabic and disyllabic words, aiming to analyze their systematic error patterns. Besides tests of perception and pronunciation, a memory test was also administered to exclude the memory errors from the pronunciation ones. The results showed that the error rates of memory were the highest, followed by that of perception, and then of pronunciation, with a statistically significant correlation between the three. Error patterns of perception and memory were in accord, with Tone 1 at the highest error rate followed by Tone 4: Tone 1 or Tone 4 in the former syllable of disyllabic words reported a higher error rate than in the latter syllable. Tone 4 reported the highest error rate for pronunciation followed by Tone 1: the error rate was higher when Tone 4 was in the former syllable of disyllabic words but lower when Tone 1 was in the former syllable.