95 research outputs found

    The Effect of Chinese Characters on the Speech Perception and Production of Retroflex Sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin

    Get PDF
    Evidence has shown that subtle implicit information of a speaker’s characteristics or social identity inferred by the listener can influence how language varieties are perceived, and can cause significant effects on the result of speech perception (e.g., Williams 1976; Beebe 1981; Thakerar and Giles 1981; Niedzielski 1999; Hay et al. 2006a; Hay and Drager 2010; Koops 2011). This dissertation aimed at studying the effects of Chinese orthography on the speech production and perception of retroflex sibilants in Mandarin Chinese. The two variants of written Chinese characters, traditional and simplified, served as subtle implicit information to index speaker’s identity of a Taiwan Mandarin speaker or Beijing Mandarin speaker respectively. The experiment designs were based on the hypotheses that Taiwan Mandarin speakers are aware of the differences between the Taiwan Mandarin dialect and the Beijing Mandarin dialect at both segmental and suprasegmental level. Furthermore, Taiwan Mandarin speakers can activate dialectal features of Beijing Mandarin with the presence of simplified Chinese characters. In the word-identification tasks of the perception study, a statistically significant relationship between the identification of retroflex phonemes and the variety of written Chinese characters was found for all participants with a Person’s chi-square test of association. With a 95% confidence interval, the odds ratio estimated that with the presence of simplified Chinese characters, participants were at least 1.83 times more likely to identify a retroflex audio stimulus with the actual retroflex phoneme instead of its corresponding alveolar sound than with the presence of traditional Chinese characters. The effect of character variation on speech production was not as straightforward as that in perception. From the data collected in this study, minimal effect was found; however, when taking the speaker’s attitude towards different varieties of characters into consideration, personal preferences toward the varieties of characters may lead to a stylistic and intentional variation in speech production of retroflex sibilants. It was found through the interview with participants of this study that Taiwan Mandarin speakers were fully aware of the variation in the production of retroflex sibilants. They were also aware of the association between simplified characters and the Beijing Mandarin dialect and this association was activated during the speech perception and production experiments of this dissertation. This study adds to the finding of research in sociophonetic variations that an asymmetry in speech production and speech perception may be a deliberate choice of the speaker instead of a result of unconscious perception and production of speech. In addition, this dissertation also shows that the abundant cultural and ideological values associated with the usage of Chinese written characters and spoken dialects are potential topics of future research

    A phonological study on English loanwords in Mandarin Chinese

    Get PDF
    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

    CONTROL AND BIOMECHANICS IN COARTICULATION: INSIGHTS FROM AN ULTRASOUND STUDY OF STANDARD MANDARIN APICAL VOWELS

    Get PDF
    This study investigated the extent to which speaker-induced control and biomechanics play a role in determining the outcome of spatial coarticulation. Employing ultrasound tongue imaging, coarticulatory effects from and induced on adjacent consonants were quantified as measures of coarticulatory resistance and aggressiveness for the two apical vowels of Standard Mandarin in comparison to the three corner vowels. The results show that the two apical vowels are much less resistant to coarticulatory effects than the vowels [i a u], and they often do not induce larger effects on adjacent consonants than these vowels, due to speaker-targeted effects. It was also found that the retroflex apical vowel was consistently more resistant and aggressive than the dental apical vowel, due to biomechanical differences. Together, both of these findings implicate the roles of speaker control and biomechanics in coarticulation and highlight the need for a model of coarticulation to include both of these factors.Master of Art

    Disability and sociophonetic variation among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

    Get PDF
    Variationist sociolinguistics has not paid much attention to linguistically pathologised groups. This thesis studies pathologised speech from a third-wave variationist perspective, exploring how oral deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) speakers of Taiwan Mandarin invoke variation in spoken Mandarin to embody hearingness or deafness. This thesis is structured into three stand-alone journal articles bookended with introductory and conclusion chapters which tie them together in the broader picture of how disability can mobilise an agentive deployment of linguistic resources. This thesis starts with an examination of how pathologised speech has been approached in linguistics and discusses why we need a third-wave perspective, which foregrounds the agency of languagers, to make a valid sociolinguistic analysis of pathologised speech. The first of the three articles is built upon one of the traditional sociolinguistic methods, minimal pair reading task, to explore how five D/HH speakers perform themselves while being highly conscious of their own speech. Different from how minimal pair reading task is usually adopted in linguistics, this study does not adopt minimal pair reading task to report what a standard speech is, for D/HH speakers. Instead, the participants are informed that their participation in the reading task is to make hearing people recognise D/HH speech, thereby empowering D/HH communities. Results show that while a large portion of the participants believe they should speak like hearing people to empower themselves, not all of them do so in the reading task. The results presented here call for a delicate inspection of the heterogeneity among D/HH people in how they view their relationship with society. The second research reports the results of a "device-on/off'' experiment where 19 participants read aloud the same sentences with and without turning on their assistive devices. Different from how this experiment is usually used in clinical linguistics and audiology, this study takes speaker agency into consideration and considers auditory deprivation as a moment where the body is transformed into a disabled body. Half of the participants report they experience negative psychological feelings during auditory deprivation, while the others report they do not. With the affective displays, we learn that the change in vowel quality during auditory deprivation should not be considered completely driven by mechanistic processes. Instead, results show that participants who display negative affect toward auditory deprivation invoke a greater degree of /i/-backing that the others do, and the negative affective display should be understood as a microcosm of how the participants think of disability in general in everyday life. The final of the three articles explores topic-based linguistic variation in passage reading. 10 participants read aloud two passages: one is not relevant to deaf people, and the other is on the identity politics of D/HH communities, in terms of how hearing people oppress D/HH signers in a fictional kingdom. Rather than seeing passage reading as an activity where speakers neutrally transform written text into spoken language, this study invites the participants to share their thoughts about the identity politics passage. Six of the participants discuss the passage from a third person point of view, distancing themselves from the radical viewpoint of identity politics; the other four participants instead take the opportunity to condemn audism and share experiences with audism. Results show that when reading the deaf people-relevant passage, the former group shift to variants which index hearingness in their stylistic repertoires, and the latter group shift to variants indexing deafness to perform solidarity

    Tones in Zhangzhou: Pitch and Beyond

    Get PDF
    This study draws on various approaches—field linguistics; auditory and acoustic phonetics; and statistics—to explore and explain the nature of Zhangzhou tones, an under-described Southern Min variety. Several original findings emerged from the analyses of the data from 21 speakers. The realisations of Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional. The single parameter of pitch/F0 is not sufficient to characterise tonal contrasts in either monosyllabic or polysyllabic settings in Zhangzhou. Instead, various parameters, including pitch/F0, duration, vowel quality, voice quality, and syllable coda type, interact in a complicated but consistent way to code tonal distinctions. Zhangzhou has eight tones rather than seven tones as proposed in previous studies. This finding resulted from examining the realisations of diverse parameters across three different contexts—isolation, phrase-initial, and phrase-final—, rather than classifying tones in citation and in terms of the preservation of Middle Chinese tonal categories. Tonal contrasts in Zhangzhou can be neutralised across different linguistic contexts. Identifying the number of tonal contrasts based simply on tonal realisations in the citation environment is not sufficient. Instead, examining tonal realisations across different linguistic contexts beyond monosyllables is imperative for understanding the nature of tone. Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is syntactically relevant. The tone sandhi domain is not phonologically determined but rather is aligned with a syntactic phrase XP. Within a given XP, the realisations of the tones at non-phrase-final positions undergo alternation phonologically and phonetically. Nevertheless, the alterations are sensitive only to the phrase boundaries and are not affected by the internal structure of syntactic phrases. Tone sandhi in Zhangzhou is phonologically inert but phonetically sensitive. The realisations of Zhangzhou tones in disyllabic phrases are not categorically affected by their surrounding tones but are phonetically sensitive to surrounding environments. For instance, the pitch/F0 onsets of phrase-final tones are largely sensitive to pitch/F0 offsets of preceding tones and appear to have diverse variants. The mappings between Zhangzhou citation and disyllabic tones are morphologically conditioned. Phrase-initial tones are largely not related to the citation tones at either the phonological or the phonetic level while phrase-final tones are categorically related to the citation tones but phonetically are not quite the same because of predictable sensitivity to surrounding environments. Each tone in Zhangzhou can be regarded as a single morpheme having two alternating allomorphs (tonemes), one for non-phrase-final variants and one for variants in citation and phrase-final contexts, both of which are listed in the mental lexicon of native Zhangzhou speakers but are phonetically distant on the surface. In summary, the realisations of Zhangzhou tones are multidimensional, involving a variety of segmental and suprasegmental parameters. The interactions of Zhangzhou tones are complicated, involving phonetics, phonology, syntax, and morphology. Neutralisation of Zhangzhou tonal contrasts occurs across different contexts, including citation, phrase-final, and non-phrase-final. Thus, researchers must go beyond pitch to understand tone thoroughly as a phenomenon in Southern Min

    Observing the contribution of both underlying and surface representations: Evidence from priming and event-related potentials

    Get PDF
    This dissertation aims to uncover the role of the acoustic input (the surface representation) and the abstract linguistic representation (the underlying representation) as listeners map the signal during spoken word recognition. To examine these issues, tone sandhi, a tonal alternation phenomenon in which a tone changes to a different tone in certain phonological environments, is investigated. This dissertation first examined how productive Mandarin tone 3 sandhi words (T3 → T2/___T3) are processed and represented. An auditory priming lexical decision experiment was conducted in which each disyllabic tone 3 sandhi target was preceded by a tone 2 monosyllable (surface-tone overlap), a tone 3 monosyllable (underlying-tone overlap), or an unrelated monosyllable (unrelated control). Lexical decision RTs showed a tone 3 (underlying-tone overlap) facilitation effect for both high and low frequency words. A second priming study investigated the processing and representation of the more complex and less productive Taiwanese tone sandhi. Lexical decision RTs, examining sandhi 24 → 33 and 51 → 55, showed that while both sandhi types exhibited facilitatory priming effects, underlying tone primes showed significantly more facilitation than surface primes for sandhi 24 → 33, while surface tone primes showed significantly more facilitation than underlying primes for sandhi 51 → 55, with both effects modulated by frequency. A third study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine Mandarin tone 3 sandhi. Using an oddball paradigm, participants passively listened to either Tone 2 standards ([tʂu2 je4] /tʂu2 je4/), Tone 3 standards ([tʂu3 je4] /tʂu3 je4/), Tone Sandhi standards ([tʂu2 jen3] /tʂu3 jen3/), or Mix standards (i.e., both tone 3 sandhi and tone 3 words), occasionally interspersed with a tone 2 word [tʂu2] (i.e., the deviant). Results showed a mismatch negativity (MMN) in the Tone 2 condition but not in the Sandhi condition, suggesting different neural processing mechanisms for Tone 2 and Sandhi words. Together, the current data suggest that the underlying tone contributes more to the processing of productive tone sandhi and the surface tone contributes more to the processing of less productive tone sandhi. In general, this dissertation provides evidence for the representation and processing of words that involve phonological alternation, both within the same language and across different languages

    Loan Phonology

    Get PDF
    For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language’s sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena

    On the cognitive basis of contact-induced sound change: Vowel merger reversal in Shanghainese

    Get PDF
    This study investigated the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ɛ/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments showed that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghainese vs. bilingual Shanghainese-Mandarin), and crosslinguistic phonological similarity all influenced the production of these vowels. These findings provide evidence for language contact as a linguistic means of merger reversal and are consistent with the view that contact phenomena originate from cross-language interaction within the bilingual mind

    The acquisition of segments and tones in Mandarin: An observational and experimental study

    Get PDF
    This is a study of early word learning and phonological development in children learning Mandarin Chinese in Singapore. Previous work has analysed mostly children’s perception and acquisition of segments and tones in the language. The objective of this thesis is to study children’s production and examine whether the asymmetry in segmental and tonal information found in perception tasks may also be apparent in tasks requiring production. Mandarin-learning children’s speech forms are systematically investigated here by integrating two strands of research: a naturalistic observational study (N = 4) of the influences of long(er)-term knowledge on phonological development in Mandarin is complemented by an experimental study (N = 20) of short-term retrieval and production of nonword repetition. The thesis is based on the whole-word approach to the study of children’s lexical development and how it may apply to Mandarin, identifying the use of phonological templates and how they may be manifested in Mandarin. Results from both production tasks reveal independence in the developmental trajectory of segment and tone production. It was not possible to conclusively identify any segmental templates. However, there was evidence of use of two T1-x tone templates, which suggest ways in which the whole-word approach might apply here: a salient and well-practiced tone (T1) since the babbling period provides a ‘tone envelope’ for segments to fill in. The well-practiced T1-x motoric routines involve lesser cognitive load, allowing attention to be directed to the (mostly variegated) segmental sequences, so that children may still achieve relatively good matches to the variegated word structures of Mandarin. Thus, there is an interchange between segments and tones and perception and production: tone perception and production begin early but tone production is mastered late, segment perception and production occur later but segment production is mastered before tone is

    A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

    Get PDF
    The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters
    • …
    corecore