The Research On Acquisition Of Mandarin Neutral Tone Of Malaysian Chinese Secondary School Students

In the previous study of the overseas Chinese,there are only a few researches focusing on the Mandarin neutral tone.On the study of whether the neutral tone of Mandarin should be included in the syllabus of Chinese language in Malaysia,the researchers had argued a lot but had not came to the conclusion.Therefore,we decided to do the research on the acquisition of neutral tone of Malaysian Chinese secondary school students.The research not only helps us to have a better understanding of the acquisition of Malaysian Chinese's neutral tone,but also provide a reference for the teaching of neutral tone in Malaysian Chinese.The research in this article is mainly divided into three experiments.Firstly,through questionnaire,we survey the recognition of various types of neutral tone by Malaysian Chinese secondary school students.Secondly,using the method of perception and hearing of Mandarin native speakers and acoustic analysis,examine the production of various types of neutral tone of Malaysian Chinese secondary school students and the main types of errors in their neutral tone production.Thirdly,through the experiment of perceptual hearing,examine the perception ability of Mandarin neutral tone of Malaysian Chinese secondary school students.The main conclusions of this article are: 1.Malaysian Chinese secondary school students have a certain ability to recognize neutral tone,but their pronunciation ability of neutral tone is weak.The main error of production of neutral tone is the duration of neutral tone is too long.2.Their neutral tone acquisition is inconsistent among various types of neutral tones,and their neutral tone production is affected by their ability of neutral tone recognition.Modal particles are the easiest type to acquire in syntactic neutral tone,while localizers and monosyllabic directional verbs are the most difficult types to acquire.In lexical of neutral tone,they are better at recognizing regular neutral tone than irregular neutral tone.Among the regular neutral tone,reduplication words are the types that are better acquired.Among the suffix-type neutral tone,the suffixes‘zi' and ‘men' are better acquired,while the quasi-suffixes ‘jia' and ‘shi'are poorly acquired.3.They have the ability to distinguish the meaning of neutral tone and original tone of the same words,but this is still be affected by the ability of neutral tone recognition.4.Their neutral tone perception ability is generally weaker than Mandarin native speakers,but better than European Chinese learners.Unlike native Mandarin speakers,duration and pitch are both important acoustic cues in their perception.The effect of duration is slightly greater than pitch.We concluded that Malaysian Chinese secondary school students are having certain level of ability to recognize and perceive neutral tone,but they are weak in production of Mandarin neutral tone.Therefore,we should pay attention to the Mandarin neutral tone teaching in Malaysia.Our suggestions are firstly we should improve teachers' ability of recognition of Mandarin neutral tone.Secondly,in the neutral tone production exercises,we should emphasize the shortening of duration of neutral tone.Finally,it is not recommended to use single word in Mandarin pronunciation teaching,instead integrate the neutral tone teaching into the lexicon teaching.