Acoustic Features of Standard Chinese Consonants by Uyghur Primary School Teachers

This research focuses on the acquisition of Chinese consonants by Uyghur primary school teachers as learners of standard Chinese language. The experiment collects, processes and analyzes the pronunciations of Chinese consonants from three groups of participants, including Uyghur primary school teachers with varied proficiency levels of standard Chinese, as well as native Chinese speakers. Based on the data collected from the acoustic experiment, a comparative analysis is conducted to uncover the Chinese consonant errors produced by Uyghur Chinese learners. The phonetic characteristics of learners with a higher level of proficiency are more similar to those of native Chinese speakers. Moreover, the acoustic features are visualized. Based on the analysis results, a series of concrete suggestions are proposed to improve the teaching and learning of standard Chinese language for Uyghur learners.