Mandarin Learners’ Tonal Patterns: An Experimental Study

This paper introduces an experimental study of Mandarin tonal sequences produced by native English speakers. Sound recordings of learners’ Mandarin have been analyzed empirically and acoustically. The conclusions are as follows: tonal variation in accented Mandarin is not correlated to the original Mandarin tones or the context of the original Mandarin tons. The pronounced Mandarin tones selectively transform to each other. The percentage of pronounced Tone 1’s and Tone 3’s are much higher than those of other pronounced tones in the accented Mandarin. Tonal combination patterns do exist, and there are two basic patterns. Pattern 1 is similar to the tonal combination T1T3, and Pattern 2 is similar to the tonal combination T3T1 or T3T4. The two basic patters serve as composing elements to form two more tonal combination patterns. The speech stream contains much more Pattern 1 tonal combinations than Pattern 2 tonal combination.