Music and language learning
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Research in second language learning has found correlations between general intelligence, musical ability, and success in learning the second language. The studies reported here concern the extent to which university conservatory students are better at perceiving and producing unfamiliar linguistic tones in Mandarin. In Experiment 1, native speakers of American English with musical training performed significantly better than non-musicians when determining whether a sine-wave tone went up, down, or remained the same in pitch. Musicians also performed significantly better than non-musicians when asked to identify the four distinctive tones of Mandarin (high-level, mid-rising, lowdipping, high-falling), which had analogous shifts in fundamental frequency to those of the sine-wave stimuli. Accuracy on the Mandarin tones for both groups was relatively low since listeners were not trained on the phonemic contrasts. Experiment 2 compared musicians and non-musicians on discrimination and imitation of these unfamiliar tones. Listeners were presented with two different Mandarin words that had either the same or different tones; listeners indicated whether the tones were same or different. All listeners had significantly more difficulty discriminating between mid-rising and low-dipping tones than with other contrasts. Listeners with music conservatory training showed significantly greater accuracy in their discrimination. Likewise, musicians' spoken imitations of Mandarin were rated as significantly more native-like than those of nonmusicians. These findings suggest that musicians may have abilities or training that facilitate their perception and production of Mandarin tones. However, further research is needed to determine whether this advantage transfers to language learning situations.Keywords:
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
It is mainly the issue of the tone when the dialect of Pei County is transferred into mandarin Chinese; in using the tone-corresponding rule, special attention should be given to some exceptional words that don't fit the rule. Ancient Chinese characters with entering tone should be classified into four tones, just like that of the mandarin Chinese, but the methods of classification are different, more often the high and level tone are classified.
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
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This paper addresses the ongoing issue of tone error detection for Mandarin Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems. A novel approach based on clustering is proposed. The selection of different contextual tonal factors including Uni-tone, LBi-tone and RBi-tone are explored. Experimental results show that our proposed approach is feasible, obtaining an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 18.75% by LBi-tone and with a 2.35% reduction compared to Uni-tone on a real corpus of nonnative speaker of Mandarin. Additionally, effects of contextual tonal factors on disyllabic words are investigated in this work.
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Word error rate
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Regarding the Mandarin falling tone's vanishing to this day,people have been prone to description through the categories and the evolution rules.As further studies,we should bring to light why and how the falling tone has been vanishing.So we think the ways and reasons of the falling tone's vanishing of Lu'an Dialect are in nine aspects,which can help explain the reasons of Jiangsu and Anhui Mandarin falling tone's vanishing,and even to all the Mandarin,which can promote mandarin studies.
Mandarin Chinese
Falling (accident)
Tone (literature)
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Xiangfan dialect belongs to the subordinate dialect area of the northern,it is the intermediate between theZhongyuan MandarinandSouthwestern Mandarin.Xiangfan dialect as well as Mandarin,has tones: level,rising,falling and rising,falling,they have no tone.The difference is that Mandarin is the four tones into the camp,while tone characters in Xiangfan dialect word is entering level tone.This paper mainly analyzed the corresponding laws of ru-tone characters in Xiangfan dialect
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Falling (accident)
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Regarding to the basic sound system of Mandarin reflected by Western Mandarin(《西蜀方言》) compiled by Adam Grainger, Zhen Shangling (1988) and Liang Deman (1993) believe that Western Mandarin are recorded the sound system of Chengdu in the last period of the nineteenth century. Mandarin Dialect (1857/1864) by Joseph Edkins, contains entering tone characters showing the pronunciation of the Chengdu Mandarin, which prevailed in the middle of the nineteenth century. So the conclusions by Zhen and Liang are open for discussion. This study investigates the pronunciation noted by Joseph Edkins in his Mandarin works and the material of Sichuan dialect to further discuss the issues of the entering tone and the basic sound system of Western Mandarin. The entering tone of Chengdu Mandarin had been distributed into the second tone since the middle of nineteenth century, differed with Western Mandarin published in the last period of the nineteenth century, and the entering tone still existed. However some of the entering tone characters in this work are pronounced in the fourth tone, the entering tone characters from the rhyme categories of Geng and Tong (梗通两摄) have shown various pronunciations. This shifted entering tones and the different pronunciations of the entering tone characters are the characteristics of the dialects around Chengdu
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Pronunciation
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Inter-language is a phenomenon of speech applications in the process of dialect tone conversion to Mandarin tone.When people from dialect area speak Mandarin,they will reform their own dialect,forming inter-language mingled with dialect tone and a Mandarin one.Mandarin teaching should be targeted at the inter-language,training them to reduce their dialect tone and to approach the Mandarin one.
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Phenomenon
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Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Feature (linguistics)
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Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
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To explore whether mandarin learn ers have their own tone categories and in what forms if any, three elementary and three intermediate learners of Chinese are recruited to take part in both pronouncing and perception experiments. Research priority is given to whether the decision outcomes of a tone from the subjects cohere with their actual tone. The results show that the perception of their own tone categories has nothing to do with learners' levels. Among those who already have stable mandarin tone categories, some of them are adept at tones so that their tone perceptual categories are similar to standard mandarin tone categories. However, others use specific perceptual strategies such as the length or the strength of the tone and so on.
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Nothing
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This paper is a comment on perception: A report on a low level tone (CAO 2010), which denies that 3 in Mandarin Chinese is a low level tone. The authors reaffirm that 3 in Mandarin Chinese is essentially a low level by reanalyzing the data from the original tests. The skewed features between high level and low level are discussed in details. It claims that the fraction of 2 in the value 214 of 3 is an on-glide due to physiological adjustment, and that of 4 is an off-glide of boundary phenomenon, thus the two half 3 and full 3 both are allophones of 3. The paper argues that phonetic experiments should be based on linguistic factors, and that phonetics should be integrated with linguistics.
Mandarin Chinese
Tone (literature)
Phenomenon
Value (mathematics)
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