Effects of hanyu pinyin on pronunciation in learners of Chinese as a foreign language

This paper provides evidence that the hanyu pinyin representation of the phonology of Chinese affects the production of Chinese phonology in instructed learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language. Pinyin generally has a one-to-one correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, but its transcription of some Chinese rimes does not represent the main vowel. As a consequence, learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language have non-target-like phonological representations of Chinese rimes, which in turn lead to non-target-like pronunciations. A hanzi reading-aloud task was used to elicit syllables containing the three rimes /iou/, /uei/ and /uən/ from final-year CFL students. Results show that learners often delete the vowels that are not represented in the pinyin transcription, but they produce the same vowels in the same rimes when the pinyin transcription represents them. It is concluded that the pinyin orthographic input interacts with the phonological input in shaping the phonological representations and pronunciation of Chinese syllables in intermediate as well as beginner CFL learners. Language teachers should therefore be aware of the effects of the pinyin orthography

Rank-frequency relation for Chinese characters

We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long Chinese texts (or for mixtures of short Chinese texts), rank-frequency relations for Chinese characters display a two-layer, hierarchic structure that combines a Zipfian power-law regime for frequent characters (first layer) with an exponential-like regime for less frequent characters (second layer). For these two layers we provide different (though related) theoretical descriptions that include the range of low-frequency characters (hapax legomena). The comparative analysis of rank-frequency relations for Chinese characters versus English words illustrates the extent to which the characters play for Chinese writers the same role as the words for those writing within alphabetical systems.Comment: To appear in European Physical Journal B (EPJ B), 2014 (22 pages, 7 figures

Learning novel sound patterns

The acquisition of vocabulary represents a key phenomenon in language acquisition, yet it is still poorly understood. Gathercole and colleagues have recently provided a rigorous test of vocabulary knowledge (the nonword repetition test, Gathercole, Willis, Baddeley, & Emslie, 1994) and have adapted the phonological loop part of the working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) to explain the nonword repetition findings (e.g. Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). However, there are two major failings in their explanation: there is no description of how words are learned, and no definition of how the phonological loop interacts with long-term memory. We present an EPAM based computational model which overcomes these problems by combining the phonological loop approach with the EPAM/chunking approach (Feigenbaum & Simon, 1984). Trained on naturalistic phonemically coded speech (from mother’s utterances to 2-3 year old children), the model provides a good match to the nonword repetition data from 2-3 year old children. The model is also able to show the effect on nonword repetition when the model is trained using different sets of input. Implementing the phonological loop within EPAM represents a parsimonious approach to learning novel sound patterns and provides a more precise definition of how vocabulary acquisition may occur