A contrastive study on the production of double vowels in Mandarin

Abstract

Abstract The concept of ‘global village’ has linked all countries in the world as a whole. The exchanges and cooperation between different countries in politics, economy, culture, and education are becoming more and more frequent. To master a language, the study of its pronunciation is crucial. Based on the above considerations, this paper uses the Chinese pronunciation corpus of 30 learners and 10 Chinese native speakers as basic data to discuss the pronunciation patterns of learners’ mandarin diphthongs and their similarities to standard pronunciations. In this paper, by using the theory and methods of experimental phonetics, comparative analysis and error analysis, we exam and analyse the acoustic features of different levels of learners in the learning process, and the pronunciation and bias of learners’ mandarin diphthongs are obtained. From the experimental results, it can be seen that all three groups of learners have some difficulties in pronunciation of mandarin diphthongs. In particular, the learners have the greatest differences to standard pronunciations when pronouncing the diphthongs [ua] and [uo]. And some important rules and conclusions are summarised through experiments. This provides an important reference for learners to solve the problems of diphthongs pronunciation in Chinese speech synthesis and recognition.