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영어

This paper throws a question whether Chinese vowel /o/[o] is a monophthong or a diphthong. It is generally accepted amongst phoneticians that Chinese vowel /o/ is pronounced as a diphthong [uo] 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 /o/ productions between Chinese and Taiwanese subjects. This is because Chinese subjects showed [o] or [uo] productions while Taiwanese subjects produced only [o]. This outcome seemed to reveal that Chinese speakers have two versions of /o/ pronunciation while Taiwanese speakers possess only one version of /o/ pronunciation, [o]. The outcome of the perception test showed more evidence of the different pronunciations of /o/ between Chinese and Taiwanese subjects. While Taiwanese and Korean subjects clearly distinguished the difference between the monophthong [o] and the diphthong [uo], Chinese subjects could not pick up the characteristic of the diphthong [uo] and they perceived it as [o]. It can be claimed that Chinese people treat /o/ as a monophthong in phonemic level while they produce this vowel as [o] or [uo] in phonetic level.