Redefining ‘Chinese’ L1 in SLP: Considerations for the assessment of Chinese bilingual/bidialectal language skills

This is the peer reviewed version made available following 12 month embargo from the date of publication (4 December 2015) in accordance with publisher policy. It has been published in final form at DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2015.1081285.'Purpose: Language assessment of bilingual/bidialectal children can be complex. This is particularly true for speakers from China, who are likely to be bilingual and bidialectal at the same time. There has been, however, a lack of understanding of the diversity of Chinese languages as well as data on bidialectal children’s L1 syntactic development and the development of L1 bidialectal children’s L2 acquisition. Method: This paper provides information on the complexity of the language system for people from China. It will present illustrative examples of the expressive language outputs of bilingual and bidialectal children from the perspective of bilingual, bidialectal linguists and speech-language pathologists. Then it will outline why appropriate assessment tools and practices for identification of language impairment in bilingual Chinese children need to be developed. Result: Considerations include that Chinese bilingual children may differ in L2 performance because of lack of exposure in the target language or because of their varied L1 dialectal backgrounds, but not necessarily because of language impairment. Conclusion: When evaluating morphosyntactic performance of bilingual children, a series of reliable threshold indicators for possible language impairment is urgently needed for SLPs to facilitate accurate diagnosis of language impairment

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

Communicative focus on form and second language suprasegmental learning: teaching Cantonese learners to perceive mandarin tones

The current study examined how form-focused instruction (FFI) with and without corrective feedback (CF) as output enhancement can facilitate L2 perception of Mandarin tones at both the phonetic and phonological levels in 41 Cantonese learners of Mandarin. Two experimental groups, FFI-only and FFI-CF, received a 90-minute FFI treatment designed to encourage them to notice and practice the categorical distinctions of Mandarin tones through a range of communicative input and output activities. During these activities, the instructors provided CF only to students in the FFI-CF group by recasting and pushing them to repair their mispronunciations of the target features (i.e., output enhancement). The control group received comparable meaning-oriented instruction without any FFI. The effectiveness of FFI was assessed via a forced-choice identification task with both trained and untrained items for a variety of tonal contrasts in Mandarin (high level Tone 1 vs. mid-rising Tone 2 vs. high falling Tone 4). According to statistical comparisons, the FFI-only group attained significant improvement in all lexical and tonal contexts, and such effectiveness was evident particularly in the acquisition of Tone 1 and Tone 4—supposedly the most difficult instances due to their identical phonological status in the learners’ L1, Cantonese. The FFI-CF group, however, demonstrated marginally significant gains only under the trained lexical conditions. The results in turn suggest that FFI promotes learners’ attentional shift from vocabulary to sound learning (generalizable gains in trained and untrained items) and facilitates their access to new phonetic and phonological categories. Yet, the relative advantage of adding CF to FFI as output enhancement remains unclear, especially with respect to the less experienced L2 learners in the current study

The effect of high variability and individual differences on phonetic training of Mandarin tones

High variability phonetic training (HVPT) has been found to be more effective than low variability phonetic training (LVPT) in learning various non-native phonetic contrasts. However, little research has considered whether this applies to the learning of tone contrasts. Two relevant studies suggested that the effect of high variability training depends on the perceptual aptitude of participants (Perrachione, Lee, Ha, & Wong, 2011; Sadakata & McQueen, 2014). It is also unclear how different types of individual difference measures interact with the learning of tonal language. What work there is, suggests that musical ability is related to discriminating tonal information and in general attention and working memory are linked to language learning. The present study extends these findings by examining the interaction between individual aptitude and input variability and between learning outcomes and individual measures using natural, meaningful L2 input (both previous studies used pseudowords). In Study 1, forty English speakers took part in an eight-session phonetic training paradigm. They were assigned to high/low variability training groups. High variability used four speakers during the training sessions while low variability used one. All participants learned real Mandarin tones and words. Individual aptitude was measured using an identification and a categorisation task. Learning was measured using a categorical discrimination task, an identification task and two production tasks. Overall, all groups improved in both production and perception of tones which transferred to novel voices and items, demonstrating the effectiveness of training despite the increased complexity of the training material compared with previous research. Although the low variability group exhibited better learning during training than the high variability group, there was no evidence that the different variability training conditions led to different performances in any of the tests of generalisation. Moreover, although performance on one of the aptitude tasks significantly predicted overall performance in categorical discrimination, identification and training tasks, it did not predict improvement from pre- to post- test. Critically, there was also no interaction between individual aptitude and variability-condition, contradicting with previous findings. One possibility was that the high variability condition was too difficult as speakers were randomly presented during training, resulting in low trial-by-trial consistency. This greater difficulty might block any advantage of variability for generalisation. In order to examine this, Study 2 recruited additional 20 native English speakers and tested them in a further condition, identical to the previous high variability condition except that each speaker was presented in their own block during the training. Although participants performed better in training compared with the high variability group from study 1, there was again no difference in generalisation compared with the previous conditions, and again no interaction between individual aptitude and variability-condition was found. Bayes Factors were also used to assess the null results. There was evidence for the null for the benefits of high variability for generalisation but only ambiguous evidence regarding whether there was interaction between variability and individual aptitude. The HPVT used in Study 1 and Study 2 did not replicate the interaction between variability-condition and aptitude found in previous studies. Moreover, although one of the measures of aptitude did correlate with the baseline measures of performance, there was no evidence that it predicted learning due to training. Additionally, the two individual aptitude measures used in Study 1 and 2 – taken from Perrachione, et al. (2011) and Sadakata and McQueen (2013) – are not comprehensive. They are natural language-related tasks which directly measure tone perception itself, rather than the underlying cognitive factors which could underpin this ability. Another interesting question is whether these different cognitive factors might contribute to learners at different stages differently, particularly since language training studies vary as to whether they use current learners of the language or naïve participants, a factor may contribute towards differing findings in the literature. To explore these issues, Study 3 investigated the relationship between a battery of cognitive individual difference measures and Mandarin tone learning. Sixty native English speakers (forty of whom were currently studying Mandarin at undergraduate level, twenty of whom were naïve learners) took part in a six-session training paradigm. With high-variability training stimuli similar to that used in Study 2 (four speakers blocked), their learning outcomes were assessed by identification, categorical discrimination and production tasks similar to Study 1. Their working memory, attention and musical ability were also measured. Overall, both groups showed improvements during training and in the generalisation tasks. Although Mandarin learner participants performed better than naïve participants overall, the improvements were not generally greater than naïve participants. Each of the individual difference measures was used to predict participant’s performance at pre-test and their improvement due to training. Bayes Factors were used as the key method of inference. For Mandarin learner participants, both performances at pre-test and pre- to- post improvement were strongly predicted by attention measures while for naïve speakers, musical ability was the dominant predictor for pre- to- post improvement. This series of studies demonstrates that Mandarin lexical tones can be trained using natural stimuli embedded in a word learning task and learning generalises to untrained voices and items as well as to production. Although there is no evidence in the current data that the type of training materials affected learning outcomes, tone learning is indeed affected by individual cognitive factors, such as attention and musical ability, with these playing a different role for learners at different stages

Chinese EFL Learners’ Acquisition of Phonology: A Comparative Analysis of the Influence of Two Dialects (Northeastern and Cantonese)

Ph. D. ThesisChinese and English belong to two distinct language families. Given that English is a lingua franca, there are millions of learners of English who speak one of the varieties of Chinese. Due to the substantial phonological differences between the two languages, Chinese learners of English may encounter difficulties when they communicate in English; developmental issues may also play a role. In addition to Mandarin, Chinese has many dialects/languages and, because these dialects/languages differ from each other, speakers of these Chinese dialects/languages pronounce English differently. It is reasonable to suppose that this behaviour is phonologically governed. The influence from the first language (L1) on second language (L2) phonology has long been viewed as an important factor (Lado, 1957; see also Anderson, 1987; Corder, 1967; Ellis, 1994; Fisiak, 1978, 1991; Gass, 1979; Odlin, 1989; Rasier and Hiligsmann, 2007; Young-Scholten, 1985). Moreover, a large number of relevant research studies on the influence of L1 on L2 have been conducted on the effects of L1 Chinese - typically Mandarin - on L2 English phonology (Li, 2006; Wang, 2007) and to a lesser extent on the influence of other L1 Chinese dialects (Chen, 2010). Why do different Chinese dialects/languages generate differences in the non-target production of English? How do different Chinese dialects/languages influence L2 English and what features, error types and specific errors do different L1 dialect/language speakers make? Questions like these can be answered partially by consulting the literature, but also need further exploration. Moreover, comparative research analysing one language (or language group) but two dialects/languages with L2 English is limited. Therefore, this study explores the phonological differences between two L1 dialects/languages to see what different effects they have on L2 phonology, and thus it contributes to filling this gap in the literature. In so doing, Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH, 1995) and Flege’s Speech Learning iv Model (SLM, 1995) are applied as theoretical frameworks. The CAH and SLM involve contradictory notions concerning categories of ‘similar’ and ‘new’ in terms of which is more difficult for the learner. Both are addressed in the present thesis to determine which can best account for the difficulties L2 English learners have in their oral production of L2 English. It needs to noted that as Groves and Mair (2008) said, Chinese situation is unique because mutual intelligibility principle is not sufficient to determine whether Chinese varieties are dialects or languages, thus, I will refer to Harbinese Mandarin and Guangzhou Cantonese as dialects as they are conventionally referred to. This research firstly compares Harbinese Mandarin and Guangzhou Cantonese which fall under the umbrella of Chinese, and to do so with respect to segments, syllable structure and stress, and their different effects on learners’ acquisition of English phonology, followed by the proposal of hypotheses based on Flege’s idea of L1-L2 similarity-based degree of difficulty in SLM. Data was collected to test these hypotheses from 65 participants from three schools at different educational levels (middle school, high school and university) from Harbin and Guangzhou. Auditory analysis, together with acoustic analysis and a native speaker’s spot check, was used to guarantee the validity of the analysis and the reliability of the results. In addition, independent-samples t-tests were carried out to check the significance of the differences in L2 English production between the two Chinese groups. The results indicate that the influence of L1 Chinese dialects/languages on L2 English is found everywhere in the sample, including in segments, syllable structure and stress, and that this influence is statistically significant. Different error types and patterns made by Harbinese and Cantonese learners of English were found. Mandarin is also v spoken by the participants and its influence can be detected from the Cantonese results. The hypotheses in the category of ‘similar’ were generally rejected and in the category of ‘new’ were completely rejected. These findings indicate that Flege’s SLM model suggesting that L1-L2 differences that are ‘similar’ are more difficult than ‘new’, cannot be supported in this context. On the contrary, Lado’s CAH, where ‘new’ differences are predicted for the difficulties L2 learners may have, was supported. In addition, the varieties of English used by Harbinese and Cantonese speakers were also checked. It seems that Harbinese speakers tend to speak American English and Cantonese speakers speak British English, but the difference is not strongly significant. Thus, it is suggested that the variety they speak may be influenced by the similarity between L1 dialects/languages and English varieties; that is to say, the dialect/language more similar to a variety of English influences oral production. With respect to the hypothesis that increased length of exposure leads to reduced error rates, the results are not completely supportive because high school subjects score best among the three levels. This may be due to factors relating to the recent evolution of English teaching in China

Suprasegmental speech perception, working memory and reading comprehension in Cantonese-English bilingual children

This study set out to examine (a) lexical tone and stress perception by bilingual and monolingual children, (b) interrelationships between lexical pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism and working memory, and (c) the association between lexical tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension. Experiment 1 tested and compared the perception of Cantonese lexical tones, English lexical stress and nonlinguistic pitch between Cantonese-English bilingual and English monolingual children. The relationships between linguistic pitch perception, non-linguistic pitch perception and working memory were also examined among Cantonese-English bilingual children. Experiment 2 explored the relationship between Cantonese tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension skills. Results of this study illustrate differential performances in tone perception but similar performances in stress perception between bilinguals and monolinguals. In addition, inter-correlations were found between linguistic pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism, working memory and reading comprehension. These findings provide new insight to native and non-native perception of lexical pitches, and demonstrate an important link that exists between lexical tone awareness and reading comprehension.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science