A Preliminary Study on Analysing Mandarin Tone Values of Romance L2 Mandarin Learners

The 5-level tone value labeling system helps characterize pitch contours of syllables for L2 Mandarin learners and teachers to facilitate tone acquisition and tone error analysis, respectively. In the past, linguistic experts did the tone value labeling and initially used it to represent or analyze the pitch contours of monosyllables. Some L2 Mandarin teachers also used the tone value labeling system to analyze pitch contours of continuous speech and illustrate pitch realizations for L2 Mandarin learners. However, the pitch contours of the labeled tone values of continuous speech were rarely objectively measured or analyzed. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of tone values of a continuous read speech corpus uttered by six Romance L2 Mandarin learners. The pitch contours of the tone value classes were explored, and some experiments related to the automatic recognition of tone and tone value classes were reported. We expect the results reported by this study to shed light on the development of an automatic tone value classification mechanism, which will be used in computer-assisted pronunciation training for L2 learners in the future.