AN ERROR ANALYSIS IN THE PRONUNCIATION OF RETROFLEXED SOUNDS IN STANDARD CHINESE : A CASE STUDY OF CHINESE SPOKEN IN SEMARANG
Daftar Isi:
- Examining how Chinese people in Semarang pronounce the Chinese retroflex sounds shows that this study is a phonology research. There are 15 participants got involved in this study. Utilizing a reading test consisted of the five Chinese retroflex sounds zh [tʂ], ch [tʂ ’ ], sh [ʂ], r [ʐ] and er [ɚ] with about twenty repetitions of each sound. The result showed that most of the participants pronounced them incorrectly in which the participants produced more fricative sounds instead of retroflex sounds. These pronunciation errors cause the sentences and phrases in the test become literally meaningless or change its meaning. Meanwhile, the listeners could still understand the meaning because of their recognition of Indonesian phonology and they also used the context-based interpretation. Keywords: Indonesian Chinese, Semarang Chinatown, standard Chinese, phonology, retroflex sounds, fricative sounds, mother tongue, context-based interpretation