Experiments And Researches On Primary Indian Medical Students’ Acquisition Of Mandarin Tones

In this thesis 10 Indian medical students take part as test subjects in two experiments, the perception experiment and the acoustic experiment. The experiments utilize Praat software to analyze the pronunciation of monosyllabic tones as uttered by test subjects. The range, types, pitch and length of test subject tones are compared with those of Mandarin native speakers. The results of this comparison highlights precisely where Indian medical students struggle with monosyllabic tones. Thereby the author puts forward some useful teaching strategies according to the results. There are five parts in this thesis.The first part introduces the background and also the relevance of the topic. It then presents known research papers, related studies, and their methodologies.The second part is concerned with the perception experiment of monosyllabic tone, including the experiment design, process and results.This part gives a comprehensive and detail analysis of the biased errors in the perception experiment.The third part is Indian medical students’ recorded monosyllabic tones acoustic experiment and data analysis. Mainly using the Audition recording software, Praat voice software and Excl drawing software to study the four tones with scientific experiments from the range, type, pitch and length of the tones. After that the author compares the data with the standard pronunciation of two Chinese and then combined with the perception experiment’s conclusions, makes a comparison between the two kinds of experiments in order to find out the Indian medical students’ biased errors in learning Mandarin tones.The forth part is about the analysis of reasons to the Indian medical students’ biased errors in tonal acquisition and relevant teaching strategies research. Combined with experiment conclusions the author discusses four reasons that caused the errors and puts forward some useful teaching methods such as Praat software method, time-delay method, gesture assist method and multimedia method.After a series of statements, the fifth part is to summarize the results of the experiments,the causes of errors, teaching strategies, innovations and shortcomings of this paper.Through the analysis we find that Indian medical students’ tone pitch range is too narrow in the monosyllabic tone acquisition.They have difficulties with the forth tones in tone type, pitch and length. For the second tone, its turning point is too far back, Indian medical students easily confuse the first tone and forth tone, the second tone and third tone.