The Acquisition of Mandarin Tones by Japanese Learners

This study focuses on the problem Japanese learners have in distinguishing between Tone 2 and Tone 3 when learning tones in Mandarin. Acoustic experiments were carried out based on the four basic vowels in Mandarin. They were designed using continual sound stimuli, which gradually changed from Tone 2 to Tone 3 (i.e. turning point and ΔF0) and performed on Japanese learners and Chinese native speakers. We demonstrated that the ability of Japanese learners to distinguish between tones 2 and 3 was affected by both factors, but more so by the turning point. Moreover, the perception distributions of the Japanese learners in our experiments varied amongst the four vowels. We found the distribution for the ambiguity of perception boundary was /i/ > /ü/ > /a/ > /u/, while the sequences of the four vowels’ F2 values is also /i/ > /ü/ > /a/ > /u/. Thus, our experimental results suggest that the perception discrimination of the Tone 2 and Tone 3 in Japanese learners of Mandarin may be affected by the difference in F2 value.