Length of Residence and Tone Production in Learners of Chinese as a Second Language

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between CSL learners’ length of residence (LOR) in the target country (i.e., Taiwan) and their accuracy in producing Chinese tones. In addition, it attempted to determine the relative productive difficulty of the tones for the learners. A total of 40 international students who learned Chinese as a second language at a university in northern Taiwan were recruited to participate in the research. All of the participants were first asked to fill in a language background questionnaire, after which they received a pronunciation test that required them to read into a tape recorder 20 Chinese characters with an equal distribution over four tones. The recordings of the participants were evaluated by three native speakers of Mandarin Chinese who majored in Chinese at university. After relevant data were collected, Pearson Product-Moment Correlations and a One-Way ANOVA were utilized to analyze them. The statistical results showed no significant correlations of LOR to the participants’ production of the Chinese tones but did find a significant difference among the mean scores for the tones. Consequently, the study concluded that with respect to Chinese tones, LOR does not play a critical role in second language acquisition of production of prosody. Moreover, it suggested that among the four Chinese tones, the 3^(rd) tone poses the most difficulty for foreign learners to acquire.