Acquisition of Mandarin Tones by Japanese learners: Evidence from Chinese-Japanese Homographs
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Huang, Fei-Hsuan
Abstract
The past two decades have witnessed a substantial increase of learning Chinese as a second language worldwide, and numerous studies have been conducted to understand the mechanism of Mandarin tonal acquisition by foreign language learners. While extant studies on the acquisition of Mandarin tones predominantly focused on production and perception, few studies have been conducted to untie the effect of L1 prosodic patterns on the acquisition of Mandarin tones. To remedy this gap, the present research aimed at examining potential L1 positive transfer of Japanese pitch-accent on the acquisition of Mandarin tones, with a special focus on Chinese – Japanese homographs. While pitch movement is a syllable-level phenomenon in Mandarin and a word-level phenomenon in Japanese, both languages refer to pitch height to change the meaning of a word. This typological similarity suggests that, for Japanese learners of Mandarin, taking advantage of pitch awareness in the native language might be beneficial in the acquisition of Mandarin tones. To test this hypothesis, fourteen Japanese learners participated in the experiment, and were asked to read a word list of Chinese-Japanese homographs. Their performance was recorded for later quantitative and qualitative analyses. A perception test was also conducted to investigate the relation between learners’ perception and production. Our results indicated that, the accuracy rates were not significantly higher for Chinese-Japanese homographs with consistent pitch height. Meanwhile, the accuracy rates were not significantly lower for lexical sets whose tonal combinations violated Japanese pitch-accent constraints. A possible explanation is that pitch movement operates at the syllable-level in Mandarin while it operates at the word-level in Japanese. Consequently, Japanese learners lack phonological awareness of pitch correspondence between Mandarin and Japanese. Nevertheless, as Flege (1995, 1996) notes, L1 and L2 sounds coexist in a shared and malleable system. Under this rationale, we suggest that explicit teaching, i.e. providing learners with phonological correspondence between L1 and L2, might activate learners’ pitch awareness, thus facilitating the acquisition of Mandarin tones. Based on the results of the present study, pedagogical implications for Japanese learners and suggestions for future studies were provided at the end of the thesis.
Subjects
Mandarin tones
Japanese pitch-accent
Chinese-Japanese homographs
tonal errors
Type
thesis
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