Tone Production in Mandarin Chinese By American Students: A Case Study

This study reports finding on the developmental stages of tone production at the sentence level by American students in their first year of learning Mandarin Chinese. The study aims to identify the different developmental characteristics of each of the four tones in near-natural speech over one academic year.16 native speakers of American English in first-year Chinese language classes participated in this study. The data were collected at the end of each academic quarter for two non-consecutive quarters. The study analyzed learners’ tonal performance and identified the different developmental characteristics of each of the four tones in both prepared and spontaneous oral speech during the first and third quarters of the 2006-2007 academic year. The study confirmed the difficulty of tone 3 in near-natural conversations.