Mandarin tone perception and production by German learners

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 attended the weekly seminar.