ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011) Venice, Italy August 24-26, 2011

Mandarin Tone Perception and Production by German Learners

Hussein Hussein (1,2), Hue San Do (1), Hansjörg Mixdorff (1), Hongwei Ding (3), Qianyong Gao (4), Guoping Hue (4), Si Wei (4), Zhao Chao (4)

(1) Department of Computer Sciences and Media, Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany
(2) Laboratory of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany
(3) School of Foreign Languages, Tongji University, Shanghai, P.R. China
(4) Department of EEIS, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, P.R. China

This paper reports on the continued activities to develop a computer-aided phonetic learning system for German learners of Mandarin. In the current study we used a corpus which consists of disyllables and sentences that were produced by first-year German students and native speakers of Mandarin. Half of the German group had attended an additional phonetic seminar. The first experiment was a tone identification test of Mandarin disyllables and production test thereof, followed by a sentence production experiment in which the subjects produced Chinese sentences in both reading and speaking mode. Prosodic features (rhythmic and intonational) of Mandarin tones between German learners and Chinese native speakers were compared. The results based on the annotations of an expert and analysis of prosodic features of Mandarin tones show that German learners who attended the weekly seminar were able to pronounce the tones better than those who did not attend the weekly seminar.
Index Terms. Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL), Mandarin tones, prosodic analysis

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hussein, Hussein / Do, Hue San / Mixdorff, Hansjörg / Ding, Hongwei / Gao, Qianyong / Hue, Guoping / Wei, Si / Chao, Zhao (2011): "Mandarin tone perception and production by German learners", In SLaTE-2011, 149-152.