A Study On The Tensity Of Mandarin Vowels By Japanese Learners

The pronunciation of Mandarin monophthong vowels by the Japanese learners has some common features because of language transfer of their mother tongue. While these phonetic characters of inter-language are largely because the tensity of the vowels.The six first class Chinese vowels (/a,o,γ, i, u, y/) produced by21Japanese learners which are divided into three groups according to their Chinese language proficiency are analyzed by Praat to investigate their phonetic characters. The result were as follows:/a/,/γ/and/u/were too lax while/o/was too tense, while the tensity error of/i/and/y/were unclear. The error were basically similar among the three groups, but the degree of the errors were slightly different between the groups. Their pronunciation of the mandarin vowels were gradually approaching the standard mandarin from the elementary level to advanced level. The vowel pronunciation of the Intermediate level students scattered on the vowel chart and were the outermost from the standard mandarin vowels.A listening test was conducted to analyze the degree of naturalness in communication. And the study showed the six first Chinese vowels from most natural to least natural are/a/,/i/,/y/,/o/,/γ/,/u/. And there was an intricate relationship between the acoustic analysis and the listening test analysis. Chinese people are relatively more sensitive about the anteroposterior of tongue and degree of the shape of the lip. Chinese had the highest tolerance of ambiguity on the vowel/a/, while had the lowest tolerance of the ambiguity on vowel/u/.Some proposals are raised to help Chinese teachers teach the first class vowels. According to the study, reminding and correction had an obvious effect on the improvement of their vowel pronunciation. And the result of correction is better than reminding.