Primacy of mouth over eyes to perceive audiovisual Mandarin lexical tones

The visual cues of lexical tones are more implicit and much less investigated than consonants and vowels, and it is still unclear what facial areas contribute to facial tones identification. This study investigated Chinese and English speakers’ eye movements when they were asked to identify audiovisual Mandarin lexical tones. The Chinese and English speakers were presented with an audiovisual clip of Mandarin monosyllables (for instance, /ă/, /à/, /ĭ/, /ì/) and were asked to identify whether the syllables were a dipping tone (/ă/, / ĭ/) or a falling tone (/ à/, /ì/). These audiovisual syllables were presented in clear, noisy and silent (absence of audio signal) conditions. An eye-tracker recorded the participants’ eye movements. Results showed that the participants gazed more at the mouth than the eyes. In addition, when acoustic conditions became adverse, both the Chinese and English speakers increased their gaze duration at the mouth rather than at the eyes. The findings suggested that the mouth is the primary area that listeners utilise in their perception of audiovisual lexical tones. The similar eye movements between the Chinese and English speakers imply that the mouth acts as a perceptual cue that provides articulatory information, as opposed to social and pragmatic information

Thai lexical tone perception in native speakers of Thai, English and Mandarin Chinese: An event-related potentials training study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Tone languages such as Thai and Mandarin Chinese use differences in fundamental frequency (F₀, pitch) to distinguish lexical meaning. Previous behavioral studies have shown that native speakers of a non-tone language have difficulty discriminating among tone contrasts and are sensitive to different F₀dimensions than speakers of a tone language. The aim of the present ERP study was to investigate the effect of language background and training on the non-attentive processing of lexical tones. EEG was recorded from 12 adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, 12 native speakers of American English, and 11 Thai speakers while they were watching a movie and were presented with multiple tokens of low-falling, mid-level and high-rising Thai lexical tones. High-rising or low-falling tokens were presented as deviants among mid-level standard tokens, and vice versa. EEG data and data from a behavioral discrimination task were collected before and after a two-day perceptual categorization training task.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Behavioral discrimination improved after training in both the Chinese and the English groups. Low-falling tone deviants versus standards elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN) in all language groups. Before, but not after training, the English speakers showed a larger MMN compared to the Chinese, even though English speakers performed worst in the behavioral tasks. The MMN was followed by a late negativity, which became smaller with improved discrimination. The High-rising deviants versus standards elicited a late negativity, which was left-lateralized only in the English and Chinese groups.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Results showed that native speakers of English, Chinese and Thai recruited largely similar mechanisms when non-attentively processing Thai lexical tones. However, native Thai speakers differed from the Chinese and English speakers with respect to the processing of late F₀contour differences (high-rising versus mid-level tones). In addition, native speakers of a non-tone language (English) were initially more sensitive to F₀onset differences (low-falling versus mid-level contrast), which was suppressed as a result of training. This result converges with results from previous behavioral studies and supports the view that attentive as well as non-attentive processing of F₀contrasts is affected by language background, but is malleable even in adult learners.</p

Can an Accelerated Intervention Close the School Readiness Gap for Disadvantaged Children? An Evaluation of the Effects of the LEARN Project’s Summer Pre-Primary Program on Literacy Outcomes in Northern Lao PDR

Developed against the backdrop of Sustainable Development Goal 4, as well as a global trend towards rigorous assessment of early childhood programs, this thesis answers questions about the effects of an accelerated school readiness intervention for non-Lao children in disadvantaged communities of Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Through a longitudinal, cluster randomized control trial, the study employs multi-level regression with an analytical sample of 391 children to examine the outcomes of a summer pre-primary program piloted from 2015-2018 by the Lao government with support from Plan International and Save the Children International in the Dubai-Cares funded Lao Educational Access, Research, and Networking (LEARN) Project. Research questions are investigated through a design in which the same panel of children are assessed against a control group at three intervals using the Measurement of Development and Early Learning. The thesis identifies significant associations between receiving the treatment and achieving higher gain scores on several emergent literacy tasks between baseline and midline, with effects roughly in line with similar interventions in other contexts. At the same time, the thesis finds that those effects had largely faded by endline. An interaction between treatment and ethnicity was only evident in a few instances, suggesting that the intervention may have boosted school readiness for Khmu children more by the start of grade 1 and for Hmong children more during grade 1. The thesis raises important recommendations about how to improve the fit between the ultimate objectives of accelerated interventions, the evaluations they undergo, and the needs of the broader education system. New contributions to knowledge are also found by interrogating a global assessment paradigm through a comparative linguistic lens, so that forthcoming evaluations benefit from the lessons learned based on LEARN’s attempt to fit a square peg into a unique alpha-syllabic, tonal Southeast Asian language

Perception of linguistic rhythm by newborn infants

Previous studies have shown that newborn infants are able to discriminate between certain languages, and it has been suggested that they do so by categorizing varieties of speech rhythm. However, in order to confirm this hypothesis, it is necessary to show that language discrimination is still performed by newborns when all speech cues other than rhythm are removed. Here, we conducted a series of experiments assessing discrimination between Dutch and Japanese by newborn infants, using a speech resynthesis technique to progressively degrade non-rhythmical properties of the sentences. When the stimuli are resynthesized using identical phonemes and artificial intonation contours for the two languages, thereby preserving only their rhythmic structure, newborns are still able to discriminate the languages. We conclude that new-borns are able to classify languages according to their type of rhythm, and that this ability may help them bootstrap other phonological properties of their native language

Congenital Amusia (or Tone-Deafness) Interferes with Pitch Processing in Tone Languages

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects music processing and that is ascribed to a deficit in pitch processing. We investigated whether this deficit extended to pitch processing in speech, notably the pitch changes used to contrast lexical tones in tonal languages. Congenital amusics and matched controls, all non-tonal language speakers, were tested for lexical tone discrimination in Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 1) and in Thai (Experiment 2). Tones were presented in pairs and participants were required to make same/different judgments. Experiment 2 additionally included musical analogs of Thai tones for comparison. Performance of congenital amusics was inferior to that of controls for all materials, suggesting a domain-general pitch-processing deficit. The pitch deficit of amusia is thus not limited to music, but may compromise the ability to process and learn tonal languages. Combined with acoustic analyses of the tone material, the present findings provide new insights into the nature of the pitch-processing deficit exhibited by amusics

Taking Tone into Account: Cognitive Neuroscientific Investigations of Mandarin Chinese Spoken Word Processing

To date, theories of how humans recognize spoken words have yet to account for tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. One reason for this is that we know relatively little about how native speakers of tonal languages process spoken words in the brain. This dissertation addresses this problem by examining Mandarin spoken word processing in both adult native speakers and typically developing children. In adults, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess the extent to which the brain regions involved in processing tonal information are distinct from those involved in vowel processing (Chapter 2), while event related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate responses to different types of phonological competition in Mandarin (Chapter 3). In the fMRI experiment, subjects performed a passive listening task, in which they heard trains of Mandarin syllables consisting of a repeated standard followed by a deviant stimulus differing from the standard in either tone or vowels. Analyses revealed that the regions involved in processing tonal versus vowel deviants were not entirely overlapping. In the ERP experiment, subjects were presented with pictures of items and subsequently heard words that either matched or mismatched the pictures. Mismatches differed from expectations in different components of the Mandarin syllable, and analyses focused on ERP components associated with various stages of spoken word processing. A key finding from this study was that different cognitive processes underlie tonal versus phonemic (vowel) access. Chapter 4 extended these findings by studying the development of Mandarin spoken word processing. In this experiment, a group of typically developing children completed the same ERP picture-word matching task as a group of adults. It was observed that the children differed from the adults primarily in their responses to rhyme mismatches. On the basis of relevant findings, Chapter 5 puts forward several recommendations as to how current theories of spoken word recognition could be modified to account for tonal languages. This proposed theory is then used to explain the observed data from the adults and typically developing children. The dissertation then closes with a brief consideration of future research directions

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