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

Tree plantations displacing native forests: The nature and drivers of apparent forest recovery on former croplands in Southwestern China from 2000 to 2015

China is credited with undertaking some of the world's most ambitious policies to protect and restore forests, which could serve as a role model for other countries. However, the actual environmental consequences of these policies are poorly known. Here, we combine remote-sensing analysis with household interviews to assess the nature and drivers of land-cover change in southwestern China between 2000–2015, after China's major forest protection and reforestation policies came into effect. We found that while the region's gross tree cover grew by 32%, this increase was entirely due to the conversion of croplands to tree plantations, particularly monocultures. Native forests, in turn, suffered a net loss of 6.6%. Thus, instead of truly recovering forested landscapes and generating concomitant environmental benefits, the region's apparent forest recovery has effectively displaced native forests, including those that could have naturally regenerated on land freed up from agriculture. The pursuit of profit from agricultural or forestry production along with governmental encouragement and mobilization for certain land uses – including tree planting – were the dominant drivers of the observed land-cover change. An additional driver was the desire of many households to conform with the land-use decisions of their neighbors. We also found that households' lack of labor or financial resources, rather than any policy safeguards, was the primary constraint on further conversion of native forests. We conclude that to achieve genuine forest recovery along with the resulting environmental benefits, China's policies must more strongly protect existing native forests and facilitate native forest restoration. Natural regeneration, which thus far has been grossly neglected in China's forest policies, should be recognized as a legitimate means of forest restoration. In addition, social factors operating at the household level, notably the pursuit of profit and conformation to social norms, should be harnessed to promote better land-cover, biodiversity, and environmental outcomes. More generally, for China and other countries to succeed in recovering forests, policies must clearly distinguish between native forests and tree plantations

Why are some languages confused for others? Investigating data from the Great Language Game

In this paper we explore the results of a large-scale online game called 'the Great Language Game', in which people listen to an audio speech sample and make a forced-choice guess about the identity of the language from 2 or more alternatives. The data include 15 million guesses from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages. We investigate which languages are confused for which in the game, and if this correlates with the similarities that linguists identify between languages. This includes shared lexical items, similar sound inventories and established historical relationships. Our findings are, as expected, that players are more likely to confuse two languages that are objectively more similar. We also investigate factors that may affect players' ability to accurately select the target language, such as how many people speak the language, how often the language is mentioned in written materials and the economic power of the target language community. We see that non-linguistic factors affect players' ability to accurately identify the target. For example, languages with wider 'global reach' are more often identified correctly. This suggests that both linguistic and cultural knowledge influence the perception and recognition of languages and their similarity

Cross-language study of voicing contrasts of stop consonants in Asian languages

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D96488 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Prosodically Conditioned Realization of Voiced Stops and Vowels in Yucatecan Spanish

This dissertation investigates the acoustic nature and distribution of prosodic strengthening in relation to the Prosodic Word domain and prosodic prominence in Yucatecan Spanish. In order to do so, phonologically voiced stops and word-initial vowels were examined in a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews and a read speech task with 16–21 speakers of the variety. The results provide evidence for prosodic strengthening of both voiced stops and word-initial vowels. The acoustic manifestations of prosodic strengthening of voiced stops are (i) longer duration, (ii) greater change in intensity, and, in extreme cases of strengthening, (iii) presence of a release burst. Strengthening of word-initial vowels is manifested through glottalization, which is present in the first portion of the vowel. Prosodic strengthening occurs in PW-initial position and especially under lexical stress, although accentuation may also play a role. Thus, prosodic strengthening is used to indicate (post)lexical prominence and boundaries at the PW level. In terms of speaker-specific variation, Yucatec Maya language dominance does not appear to favor more strengthened realizations either of voiced stops or word-initial vowels, while gender has no effect on the distribution of strengthened realizations. Finally, a proposal is made for the strengthening of voiced stops and glottalization of word-initial vowels being used to mark the left edges of a recursive PW in Yucatecan Spanish

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels

Rhythm measures and dimensions of durational variation in speech a)

a) Preliminary results obtained on part of the corpus were presented in "Rhythm measures with language-independent segmentation", Proceedings of Interspeech, Brighton, 2009Brighton, , 1531Brighton, -1534 Dimensions of durational variation in speech 1 Abstract Patterns of durational variation were examined by applying fifteen previously published rhythm measures to a large corpus of speech from five languages. In order to achieve consistent segmentation across all languages, an automatic speech recognition system was developed to divide the waveforms into consonantal and vocalic regions. The resulting duration measurements rest strictly on acoustic criteria. Machine classification showed that rhythm measures could separate languages at rates above chance. Between-language variability in rhythm measures, however, was large and comparable to within-language differences. Therefore, different languages could not be identified reliably. In experiments separating pairs of languages, a rhythm measure that was relatively successful at separating one pair often performed very poorly on another pair: there was no broadly successful rhythm measure. A combination of three rhythm measures was necessary for separation of all five languages at once. Many triplets were comparably effective, but the confusion patterns between languages varied with the choice of rhythm measures. These findings are similar to the results of perceptual studies, and they challenge the reality of rhythm classes