Effects of Repeating and Perceptual Training to Improve Chinese Tone Pronunciation Ability

Many teaching materials on Chinese pronunciation emphasize on imitation practice. However, it is liable to neglect the training of pronunciation elements called “tone,” which is essential in semantic communication in Chinese. For this reason, incorrect pronunciation wears, the progress of learning is often stalled. Therefore, to solve these problems, we are developing a learning application of tone that emphasizes correctly acquiring “tone” by perceptual training. This application uses a collection of perception questions thought to be useful for learners who could not grasp the acoustic feature of Chinese tone. And we experimented with a pronunciation pretest to evaluate the learning effect of the application by investigating the improvement of pronunciation ability. The results showed that solving perceptual training tasks is more effective than imitation practice to acquire tone ability. Furthermore, it is considered that taking a fundamental tone pronunciation pretest before using the learning tool is significantly related to the improvement of tone pronunciation ability.