Lili Wu Chinese

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Phonological accuracy and phonological patterns in Cantonese-English bilingual children

This paper aimed to describe the phonological systems of Cantonese and English in bilingual children in Hong Kong, and to determine the presence and nature of interaction between the two languages. A total of 48 children aged between 4;00 and 4;11 were recruited, with 24 Cantonese-English successive bilinguals from five local international kindergartens and 24 Cantonese monolingual children from two local kindergartens. The Cantonese Segmental Phonology Test (CSPT, So, 1993) and Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2 (Goldman & Fristoe, 2000) were administered. Cantonese phoneme accuracies and phonological processes were compared between the two groups to investigate on any possible interference effect. Results indicated no interference effect of learning English on Cantonese phoneme accuracies, but transfer was evident in the phonological processes in the bilingual children when compared to their monolingual counterparts.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Phonological Contrast in Bai

This dissertation presents an account of synchronic phonological contrast for the Bai language. Bai is a Sino-Tibetan language primarily spoken in Yunnan Province in Southwest China. There is a sizable amount of published research on this language due to the large amount of Chinese-related basic vocabulary in Bai, which is of considerable interest in the field of Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. However, most of the available references prioritize the ability to transcribe the observed contrastive syllables as distinct from one another instead of offering synchronic phonological analysis of this language. The proposal I present in this dissertation intends to fill this gap in the literature with phonological analysis of the consonant, vowel, and tone systems of the Erhai (Dali), Jianchuan, and Heqing varieties of Bai. My phonological analysis assumes articulator-based distinctive features, syllable structure, time slots, and other commonly assumed phonological architecture to generate all well-formed phonological representations in this language. The proposal fundamentally differs from prior descriptions in that pre-nuclear glides are consistently treated as constituents of the onset and not as constituents of the rime of the Bai syllable. Along with this fixed syllable structure, underspecification and economy in underlying representations are argued to optimize the ratio of attested-to-possible syllables within the space of predicted syllable types. Furthermore, these principles are suggested to limit the range of surface phonological variation attested across speakers. Specific phonemena addressed in detail include spreading processes (such as palatalization), identification of merged tone categories, representation of the rhotic vowel, and epenthetic segments. The generalizations I identify are supported by descriptions of word-based evidence and phonetic data – both from the literature and collected through lexical elicitation in the field. The Zhaozhuang variety is explored in thorough detail and a syllable inventory of this variety with lexical examples for each syllable type glossed in English and Chinese is included in the appendicies of this dissertationPHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137117/1/opper_1.pd

A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

The general opinion about the way English borrowings enter Mandarin is that English words are preferably integrated into Mandarin via calquing, which includes a special case called Phonetic-Semantic Matching (PSM) (Zuckermann 2004), meaning words being phonetically assimilated and semantically transferred at the same time. The reason for that is that Mandarin is written in Chinese characters, which each has a single-syllable pronunciation and a self-contained meaning, and the meaning achieved by the selection of characters may match the original English words. There are some cases which are agreed by many scholars to be PSM. However, as this study demonstrates, the semantics of the borrowing and the original word do not really match, the relation considered to be “artificial” by Novotná (1967). This study analyses a corpus of 600 established English loanwords in Mandarin to test the hypothesis that semantic matching is not a significant factor in the loanword adaptation process because there is no semantic relation between the borrowed words and the characters used to record them. To measure the phonological similarity between the English input and the Mandarin output, one of the models in adult second language perception, the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1995a), is used as the framework to judge the phonemic matching between the English word and the adapted Mandarin outcome. The meanings of the characters used in recording the loanwords are referred in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese to see whether there are cases of semantic matching. The phonotactic adaptation of illicit sound sequences is also analysed in Optimality Theory (McCarthy 2002) to give an account of phonetic-phonological analysis of the adaptation process. Thus, the percentage of Phono-Semantic Matching is obtained in the corpus. As the corpus investigation shows, the loanwords that can match up both the phonological and the semantic quality of the original words are very few. The most commonly acknowledged phono-semantic matching cases are only phonetic loanwords. In conclusion, this paper argues that the semantic resource of Chinese writing system is not used as a major factor in the integration of loanwords. Borrowing between languages with different writing systems is not much different than borrowing between languages with same writing system or without a writing system. Though Chinese writing system interferes with the borrowing, it is the linguistic factors that determine the borrowing process and results. Chinese characters are, by a large proportion, conventional graphic signs with a phonetic value being the more significant factor in loanword integration process

Hakka tone training for native speakers of tonal and nontonal languages

Language learning becomes increasingly difficult when novel linguistic features are introduced. Studies have shown that learners from various language backgrounds can be trained to perceive lexical tone, which assigns meaning to words using variations in pitch. In this thesis, we investigated whether native speakers of tonal Mandarin Chinese and tonal Vietnamese outperformed native speakers of nontonal English when learning Hakka Chinese tones following five sessions of tone training, and whether the complexity (i.e., density) of a listener’s native tone inventory facilitated nonnative tone learning. All groups improved in tone identification and tone word learning following training, with improvements persisting three weeks following the cessation of training. Although both tonal groups outperformed the English group in most tasks, the Mandarin group showed the most consistent advantages over the English group across tasks. Findings suggest that tone experience bolsters tone learning, but density of the tone inventory does not provide an advantage. Confusion patterns offer detailed insight of the interaction between nonnative tones and native tonal and intonational categories

Beyond the Monolingual Core and out into the Wild: A Variationist Study of Early Bilingualism and Sound Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese

This dissertation focuses on variation and change in the vowel system of Toronto Heritage Cantonese with the goal of pushing variationist research on sound change beyond its monolingually oriented core (Nagy 2016) and in approaching the study of heritage languages from the perspective of spontaneous speech. It addresses the possibility of contact-induced inter-generational vowel shifts, mergers, and splits in native vocabulary. It also addresses the extent to which demographic, ethnic orientation, or language use factors may account for these changes. The data comes from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Project (Nagy 2011) and includes hour-long sociolinguistic interviews from Toronto residents of different age, sex, and generational backgrounds speaking in Cantonese along with Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire data and a picture description task from each speaker. The mean F1/F2 of each vowel category from each of 32 speakers were measured in native (and integrated English) vocabulary. The results show lack of vowel shifts, evidence for merger in progress of /y/ ~ /u/, and evidence for a pre-nasal split in /ɛ/. The speakers who lead in this merger and split are the ones who used the least amount of Cantonese in the interview samples. The lack of the same structural changes from Hong Kong speakers further supports an account based on contact-induced change. These findings challenge Labov’s (2007) Transmission and Diffusion model and suggest more sociolinguistic engagement with theoretical models of contact-induced change (cf. Thomason & Kaufman 1988, van Coetsem 2000)