Influencing Factors Of Chinese Stress Perception And Output In Non-tonal Language Natives

Some Chinese learners exhibit a tendency to perceive forth-tone syllable as accents.The acoustic commonality of Chinese tone categories and native language stress categories seems to affect their acquisition of Chinese stress categories.This study focuses on the acquisition of Chinese stress by native speakers of non-tonal languages,exploring whether and in what manner Chinese tones and other factors have an impact.This study designed two experiments on Chinese stress perception and production,which were completed by Japanese and Russian native speakers with different proficiency levels.The perception experiment required the subjects to identify the stress syllable in meaningless twosyllable groups.The production experiment placed syllables with different tones in the logical stress position of the sentence and the subjects were asked to say the sentences.The experimental results show that Japanese native speakers tend to perceive the forth-tone syllables as accents,and produce accented syllables as first tone and forth tone;The perception tendency of native speakers of Russian is distributed in four tones,while the output tends to be forth tone.Native speakers of non-tonal languages exhibit a propensity for specific tonal syllables,and this propensity does not exhibit cross language consistency,and the performance of language perception and output is not entirely consistent.This may be related to the characteristics of the stress category of the language itself: Japanese uses pitch accent as a means of expression of tonal stress,while Russian stress mainly uses pitch,length,and timbre as means of expression.In addition,in this experiment,Chinese proficiency did not show a significant impact on stress perception.Based on the transfer theory in second language acquisition,this study further explores how category transfer occurs when categories with different numbers and levels are related,and whether and how prosodic expressions at different levels affect each other.In this way,this study has certain theoretical significance.