An Experimental Study On The Pitch Of Prosodic Words In Chinese Utterance Among Students From Thailand, Indonesia And Korea

Taking the basic prosodic unit of Chinese utterance---prosodic words as object and focusing onforeign students’ acquisition of prosody, this paper investigates the performance of foreignstudents from Thailand, Korea and Indonesia on their high point, low point and register of pitchof the syllable in disyllabic prosodic words, and compares it to that of Chinese students. Then theerror pattern of foreign students from each country and its causes are analyzed respectively. It isfound that error in high point and low point of pitch of disyllabic prosodic words is quitecommon among Korean and Indonesia students, which is that the pitch of Korean and Indonesiastudents are much lower than that of Chinese students. This might be causes by the effect ofmother tongue transfer since both of the mother tones of the students from these two countriesare non-tonal language. Students from Thailand has a better control on the pitch of the syllable indisyllabic prosodic words because their mother tone is a tonal language as Chinese is. However，their high point and low point of the high level tone and the rising tone are lower than that ofChinese in an obvious way as well. As to the register, students from all of the three countriesperform well, except that Indonesia students show a narrower one in the falling-rising tone thanChinese students. To conclude, the error pattern for pitch can be interpreted as: the register isrelatively acceptable while the scale as a whole is significantly lower than that of Chinese.