Visual displays of the pitch pattern for the CAI self-teaching system to discriminate Chinese tones

Abstract

A computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system for self-teaching to discriminate Chinese tones is available for public through the internet (http://chinesetone.org) in Japanese, English, and Chinese versions. The design and construction of this system has been reported previously (Hiki et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 120 (5, Pt. 2), 2006, 3168). This system utilizes the displays of the pitch pattern as visual cues in training. The following new functions of the visual displays have been added to the system recently: 1) Essential pitch patterns of 15 bisyllabic words, with every combination of the four tones in Standard Chinese, were drawn on the six whole tone musical scale. By displaying visually the corresponding essential pitch pattern along with the measured pitch pattern, it became easier for the beginners to perceive aurally the tonal characters, which underlay the measured pitch patterns; 2) The bisyllabic word lists comprising only voiced consonants were edited, and the measured pitch patterns not interrupted by unvoiced consonants were displayed visually. These speech samples were useful in the early stages of tone discrimination learning. It was also ascertained that the tone discrimination was stimulated by paying attention to musical pitch perception.