古巴学习者汉语单字调偏误的声学分析

Abstract

Under the theoretical guidance of experimental phonetics, this study examines the tone issues of Cuban learners of Chinese at beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels. Using a combination of acoustic analysis and perceptual experiments, the research analyzes learners’ tone performance and tone errors from the perspectives of pitch, tone contour, and fundamental frequency curves. The study selected the most representative speech samples from a corpus of Cuban Chinese learners, ultimately identifying 10 Cuban Chinese learners: 5 beginners, 3 intermediate learners, and 2 advanced learners. Each participant read 99 monosyllabic syllables (excluding neutral tone). Praat software was used for acoustic analysis to obtain fundamental frequency data, and 4 professional evaluators conducted perceptual analysis. The research found that Cuban learners’ mastery of Chinese tones generally shows a positive trend, with all four tones maintaining relatively high accuracy rates. The difficulty order of tones is: Tone 1, Tone 2, Tone 4, and Tone 3, indicating that even beginning-level learners have established relatively good tone awareness. Tone acquisition exhibits non-linear development characteristics. Beginning-level learners tend to over-emphasize tonal features leading to exaggerated pronunciation, intermediate-level learners begin to focus on naturalness but may neglect accuracy, and advanced-level learners achieve a better balance between naturalness and accuracy, though still not completely reaching the ideal state. Regarding tone errors, the most prominent issue is mutual confusion between Tone 3 and Tone 2, manifesting as significant perceptual and production difficulties between these two tones. From the perspective of tonal register, learners generally exhibit the problem of lower pitch values; even at the advanced level, their tone performance still fails to fully meet standard pitch requirements, which is related to the characteristics of their native language tonal system. The stability of tone mastery gradually strengthens with increasing proficiency level, from relatively large fluctuations at the beginning stage, to becoming more stable at the intermediate stage, and finally showing the best stability at the advanced stage, demonstrating strong tone control ability. This study not only reveals the characteristics and patterns of tone acquisition by Cuban learners but also provides empirical evidence and theoretical support for targeted tone research.