The Acoustic Study Of Erhua Rhyme For Chinese Learners From Japan In Advanced Level

Erhua is an important linguistic phenomenon in Chinese,and it has always been the focus of linguistic study.The Erhua rhyme is an important part of the Erhua.At present,the research on the Erhua rhyme has left a considerable number of achievements in both theory and practice.However,there are few empirical studies on the Erhua rhyme,and also little observation of the Erhua rhyme from the perspective of the international Chinese teaching.The pronunciation errors of the Erhua rhyme from Chinese learners of different backgrounds need to be further explored.This paper is mainly a quantitative study based on the method of experimental phonetics.We recruited 8 advanced Japanese learners of Chinese to investigate the third formant and duration of their Erhua rhyme pronunciation,and compared the results with the pronunciation of Chinese native speakers.The result shows that it took Japanese students a longer duration to pronounce Erhua rhyme and the decline of the third formant is lower compared with Chinese native speakers,indicating that Japanese students do not roll their tongues enough to pronounce Erhua rhyme.In addition,for Chinese native speakers,the type of rhyme also affects the degree of tongue rolling,in which the E type rhyme(rhyme with a [η] coda),namely,the loss of the rhyme tails and the nasalization of vowels in the rolling process has the most significant impact on the degree of tongue rolling.By analyzing the acoustic measurements of Japanese students in Erhua rhyme,this paper finds out that their pronunciation errors of Erhua rhyme are mainly due to the complicated rules of Erhua and the impact of negative transfer from mother tongue.Based on the specific reasons for the errors,this paper puts forward relevant teaching suggestions,such as the Erhua standards can be lowered and teachers who know students’ mother tongue can be trained,hoping to promote the teaching of Erhua rhyme.