Research on Phonetic Biases of Comorian Chinese Beginners

Abstract

In this paper, acoustic analysis has been conducted with Praat based on 22 Chinese speech samples collected from Comorian Chinese beginners. Results showed that Comorian Chinese beginners are prone to the following bias while learning Chinese phonetics: (1) TuanYin phonemes j[tɕ], q[tɕ^h], x[ɕ] being articulated as tongue-tip JianYin phonemes; (2) the three Chinese i vowels being articulated with positions neither high nor front enough; (3) palatal i vowel and tongue-tip i vowel being confused; (4) SeCaYin phonemes z[ts], j[tɕ], zh[tʂ], c[ts^h], q[tɕ^h], ch[tʂ^h] being articulated lacking an effective air-blocking initial stage; (5) voiced CaYin phoneme “r[ʐ]” being pronounced as a trill; (6) aspirated phonemes and unaspirated ones being confused; (7) final vowels ou [әu], u/u; y; әu/, and ü [y] being confused; (8) the phoneme ch [tʂ^h] being articulated as [∫]; (9) neither rising the scale of the YangPing tone, nor lowering the scale of the QuSheng tone as expected; (10) the ShangSheng tone being pronounced into two halves and within incorrect pitch ranges; (11) deviating from the right pitch trajectory in the speech flow. Most of these biases have something to do with the multilingual background of local learners derived in an environment where the influence of their native language is lost, the phonetic and provincial rules of Chinese PinYin Scheme, and improper teaching and learning methods. To correct these biases, lots of treatment suggestions have been put forward, such as benchmark-referencing teaching and the YinPing -QuSheng -YangPing -ShangSheng teaching sequence for Chinese four tones.