A Study on Chinese Vowel /e/ - Is this vowel a Monophthong or a Diphthong?

This paper throws a question whether Chinese vowel /e/[] is a monophthong or a diphthong. It is generally accepted amongst phoneticians that Chinese vowel /e/ is pronounced as a diphthong [ə] in everyday life. However, Chinese and Taiwanese Ministries of Education regulate and many Chinese scholars claim that this vowel is a monophthong. To examine why this kind of confusion has arisen, we carried out a production test of this Chinese vowel against Chinese and Taiwanese female subjects and a perception test of the identical vowel with Korean females who can speak Chinese, Chinese and Taiwanese female subjects. The results of the production test showed that there was a discrepancy of the independent /e/ productions between Chinese and Taiwanese subjects. This is because Chinese subjects showed [ə] or [] productions while Taiwanese subjects produced only []. This outcome seemed to reveal that Chinese speakers have two versions of /e/ pronunciation while Taiwanese speakers possess only one version of /e/ pronunciation, []. The outcome of the perception test showed more evidence of the different pronunciations of /e/ between Chinese and Taiwanese subjects. While Taiwanese and Korean subjects clearly distinguished the difference between the monophthong [] and the diphthong [ə], Chinese subjects could not pick up the characteristic of the diphthong [ə] and they perceived it as []. It can be claimed that Chinese people treat /e/ as a monophthong in phonemic level while they produce this vowel as [ə] or [] in phonetic level.