An Experimental Study on Inter-Word Pauses in Mandarin Chinese Declarative Sentences of Indonesian Learners

Pauses primarily refer to the interruption and the interval in the flow of speech, which is one type of phonological prosody. Using a phonetic experiment, this paper investigated inter-word pauses in Indonesian learners' declarative sentences in Mandarin Chinese. In order to describe the features of Indonesian learners' pauses in terms of number, duration, and position, the target parameters were extracted and analyzed using computer-based acoustic analysis software and compared to Chinese students' inter-word pause data. Consistent with the study, the types of inter-word pause errors made by Indonesian learners include a high number of pauses, a long duration of pauses, and the incorrect position of pauses; the cause of the errors was primarily due to the influence of the target language and interference from the native language. Based On this, the study recommends targeted phonological instructional strategies, urging teachers to use linguistic comparison to activate the error warning mechanism ahead of time, focusing on the teaching of phonological elements and methods of speech flow training, and consciously differentiating grammatical and prosodic structures in Mandarin Chinese.