Analysis of errors in Mandarin disyllabic tones produced by Vietnamese speakers

Abstract This study investigates the tone production of Mandarin disyllabic words by Vietnamese speakers. It aims to provide insights into the challenges Vietnamese speakers face when producing Mandarin tones in disyllabic words. In the study, there were 30 Vietnamese L2 learners of Mandarin, who were requested to produce 80 (4 tones × 4 tones × 5 words of each tonal combination) disyllabic words in Mandarin. The overall results showed that Tone 4 was the most difficult among the four lexical tones. In the first syllable, most errors were found for Tone 3 when followed by another Tone 3 (where the first Tone 3 should be pronounced as a rising tone, similar to Tone 2, but mispronounced as Tone 3), which indicated that Vietnamese speakers tend to underapply Mandarin third tone sandhi . In the second syllable, most errors were found for Tone 4 when preceded by Tone 4 (the second Tone 4 mispronounced as Tone 1). The findings can help explore how L2 production models can account for L2 production of Mandarin tones by considering effects of phonetic/phonological nature of Mandarin lexical tones as well as the interference arising from the L1 phonology of learners.