Page 74 - Difference or Disorder Digital Version

Chapter 11:MANDARIN

SPECIAL NOTE: TONAL LANGUAGES

Mandarin is a tonal language; the written characters are phonetically represented by

both a single syllable and a tonal marker. Mandarin has four distinct tones and one neutral

tone. Tonal markers are produced using intonation contours, the rise and fall of pitch, across

the syllable. It is this combination of phonemes (segmental features) and intonation

(suprasegmental features) that provides meaning to a syllable. If both aspects of the syllable

are not produced correctly, a completely different word meaning can be understood.

Individual characters can be used in either isolation or in combination to form semantic

representations. The same phonological representation is used, whether the written symbol

is a Chinese character or the Pinyin word. Pinyin is a transcription of Chinese characters using

a Roman alphabetical system and is used to represent words in a semi‐phonological manner

with markers to indicate the suprasegmental/tonal features. For example, the word “that” is

represented in standard Chinese by the character 那 in Pinyin, “náh” in Mandarin, and “nà”

in Cantonese.

Syllable Tone Level Tone Description Word Meaning
Mā 1 High‐level Mother

Má 2 Rising Hemp
Mă 3 Falling‐rising Horse
Mà 4 Falling To scold

(Cheng, 1991; Hua & Dodd, 2000)

The influences of the tonal aspect and monosyllabic/bisyllabic nature of Mandarin

can result in difficulty producing intonation patterns when speaking English. The production

of polysyllabic words can result in omission of syllables or inaccurate syllable stress patterns. 62

These difficulties can also be seen across entire sentence level intonation contours, resulting

in what can be described as “sounding monotone to the ears of Standard American English

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