Visual displays of the voice 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 to the public through the Internet (http://chinesetone.org) in Japanese, English, and Chinese versions. The design and construction of this system have been reported previously (Hiki et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 120 (5, Pt. 2), 2006). This system utilizes displays of the voice pitch pattern as visual cues in training. The following new functions of the display recently have been added to the system: 1) Essential voice pitch patterns of 15 disyllabic words, with every combination of the four tones in Standard Chinese, were drawn on a six-whole-tone musical scale. It is expected that displaying the corresponding essential voice pitch pattern along with the observed voice pitch pattern will make it easier for beginners to aurally perceive the tonal features, which underlay the observed pitch patterns; 2) Disyllabic word lists comprising only voiced sound source were developed, and the observed voice pitch patterns uninterrupted by unvoiced consonants were displayed visually. These speech samples were useful in the early stages of tone discrimination learning.