A Study on Tone Errors in Mandarin Spoken by Preschool Children in the Amdo Tibetan Area

The Amdo Tibetan dialect is non-tonal, whereas Mandarin Chinese features four distinct tones. Consequently, children who speak the Amdo Tibetan dialect as their first language tend to make significant tonal pronunciation errors when learning Mandarin, resulting in a noticeable "Tibetan accent and tone". This paper employs experimental phonetic methods to quantitatively assess these tonal pronunciation errors in monosyllabic and disyllabic words. The results indicate that the order of difficulty in acquiring the four monosyllabic tones is as follows: Falling-rising tone > Rising tone > Falling tone > Level tone. In the case of disyllabic combinations, the most challenging tone pair to acquire is the Falling-rising tone + Falling-rising tone, while the easiest is the Level tone + Level tone. Based on the error analysis, we have summarized the sequence of tonal teaching difficulty, which can assist preschool children in effectively learning Mandarin tone pronunciation.