Mandarin Chinese Sentences Research Articles

The perception of emotional prosody in Mandarin Chinese words and sentences

Emotional prosody refers to the ways in which the tone of voice can be modulated to convey emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Previous studies have explored the perception of emotional prosody and whether native speakers (L1) have an in-group advantage in recognizing the emotional prosody of their own cultural groups over non-native speakers. However, little is known about whether these findings in non-tonal languages can be generalized to tonal languages. Mandarin Chinese uses the tone of voice to encode word meanings in addition to emotional prosody. This study investigates the perception of emotional prosody in Mandarin Chinese using an emotion judgment task, focusing on the effects of emotion type (e.g., neutral, joy, anger, sadness) and syllable length (e.g., monosyllable, disyllable, trisyllable, and sentence). Three groups were included, consisting of 20 native Chinese speakers (native group), 20 L1-English L2-Chinese learners (second language group), and 20 native English speakers without Chinese learning experience (non-native group). The results revealed that all three groups can identify emotional prosody well above the chance level in Mandarin Chinese words and sentences. Moreover, the native group and the second language (L2) group showed an in-group advantage in recognizing emotional prosody compared to the non-native group, highlighting the impact of linguistic experience in addition to cultural backgrounds on the perception of emotional prosody. Notably, the effects of emotion type and syllable length differed across the three groups in terms of their perception of emotional prosody. The native group had difficulty identifying positive emotional prosody, whereas both the L2 group and the non-native group showed a pattern of improved accuracy as syllable length increased, with an interaction effect with emotion type.

No Musician Advantage in the Perception of Degraded-Fundamental Frequency Speech in Noisy Environments.

Pitch variations of the fundamental frequency (fo) contour contribute to speech perception in noisy environments, but whether musicians confer an advantage in speech in noise (SIN) with altered fo information remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of different levels of degraded fo contour (i.e., conveying lexical tone or intonation information) on musician advantage in speech-in-noise perception. A cohort of native Mandarin Chinese speakers, comprising 30 trained musicians and 30 nonmusicians, were tested on the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences with natural, flattened-tone, flattened-intonation, and flattened-all fo contours embedded in background noise masked under three signal-to-noise ratios (0, -5, and -9 dB). Pitch difference thresholds and innate musical skills associated with speech-in-noise benefits were also assessed. Speech intelligibility score improved with increasing signal-to-noise level for both musicians and nonmusicians. However, no musician advantage was observed for identifying any type of flattened-fo contour SIN. Musicians exhibited smaller fo pitch discrimination limens than nonmusicians, which correlated with benefits for perceiving speech with intact tone-level fo information. Regardless of musician status, performance on the pitch and accent musical-skill subtests correlated with speech intelligibility score. Collectively, these results provide no evidence for a musician advantage for perceiving speech with distorted fo information in noisy environments. Results further show that perceptual musical skills on pitch and accent processing may benefit the perception of SIN, independent of formal musical training. Our findings suggest that the potential application of music training in speech perception in noisy backgrounds is not contingent on the ability to process fo pitch contours, at least for Mandarin Chinese speakers. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23706354.

Complement Coercion in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence from a Self-paced Reading Study.

The study aims to explore the processing pattern of Mandarin Chinese sentences with complement coercion. Complement coercion is a known linguistic phenomenon in which some verbs, semantically requiring an event-denoting complement, are combined with an entity-denoting complement, as in Mary began the book. The combination (i.e., event-selecting verb + entity-denoting noun) has been reported to involve type mismatch, and thus elicitsprocessing difficulty. While the phenomenon has been extensively studied in Indo-European languages, such as English and German, it is debatable if the phenomenon exists in a typologically distinct language from English (e.g., in structural complexity of words), such as Mandarin. To provide empirical evidence, the study conducted a self-paced reading experiment to compare the processing patterns of coercion sentences and non-coercion controls in Mandarin. The results showed longer reading times for the coercion sentences than the non-coercion counterparts, which supported previous findings about the processing difficulty of complement coercion.

Effect of F0 contour on perception of Mandarin Chinese speech against masking.

Intonation has many perceptually significant functions in language that contribute to speech recognition. This study aims to investigate whether intonation cues affect the unmasking of Mandarin Chinese speech in the presence of interfering sounds. Specifically, intelligibility of multi-tone Mandarin Chinese sentences with maskers consisting of either two-talker speech or steady-state noise was measured in three (flattened, typical, and exaggerated) intonation conditions. Different from most of the previous studies, the present study only manipulate and modify the intonation information but preserve tone information. The results showed that recognition of the final keywords in multi-tone Mandarin Chinese sentences was much better under the original F0 contour condition than the decreased F0 contour or exaggerated F0 contour conditions whenever there was a noise or speech masker, and an exaggerated F0 contour reduced the intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese more under the speech masker condition than that under the noise masker condition. These results suggested that speech in a tone language (Mandarin Chinese) is harder to understand when the intonation is unnatural, even if the tone information is preserved, and an unnatural intonation contour decreases releasing Mandarin Chinese speech from masking, especially in a multi-person talking environment.

An ERP study of the processing of epistemic modality adverbs yexu and yiding in Mandarin Chinese

Numerous studies have demonstrated that word frequency influences sentence processing. However, the impact of frequently used epistemic modality adverbs on sentence processing is less clear. The aim of the present study is to investigate the processing of Chinese epistemic modality adverbs by means of ERPs (event-related potentials) based on degrees of modal certainty encoded by different orthographic forms of two epistemic adverbs yexu (possibly) and yiding (surely) co-occurred with two psychological verbs guji (estimate) and quexin (convince) in Mandarin Chinese sentences as Wo guji Xiaolin yexu hui jingxuan banzhang (I estimate Xiaolin possibly future compete monitor). Two conditions (i.e. agreed and disagreed conditions) are constructed through manipulating the agreement of the certainty degree between the psychological verbs and the epistemic adverbs. Twenty-four enrolled Chinese college students took part in the ERP experiment. The results showed that the epistemic adverb yexu (possibly) in disagreed sentences (quexin &yexu) relative to agreed sentences (guji &yexu), elicited a monophasic P600 effect with a centro-parietal distribution, indicating extra syntactic costs in processing the epistemic adverb in sentences with modal uncertainty. The absence of N400 was observed for processing yexu (possibly) in the agreed and disagreed sentences, suggesting that little semantic processing difficulty of the epistemic adverb happens in sentences with modal certainty and/or uncertainty. While for the epistemic adverb yiding (surely) in the agreed and disagreed sentences, the absence of P600 and N400 indicates that little difficulty in syntactic and/or semantic processing of the epistemic adverb happens in sentences with modal certainty and/or uncertainty.

The cognitive and neural oscillatory mechanisms underlying the facilitating effect of rhythm regularity on speech comprehension

Abstract Although a larger number of studies with Indo-European languages as materials have demonstrated the facilitating effect of rhythm regularity on speech comprehension, the internal mechanisms underlying this facilitating effect is still not completely clear. The present electroencephalograph study examined whether and how a rhythmical sentence context affects Mandarin Chinese speech comprehension, and the cognitive and neural oscillatory mechanisms underlying this rhythm regularity effect. Participants listened to Mandarin Chinese sentences that had a regular or irregular rhythm context and that contained critical nouns that were semantically congruent or incongruent given the preceding sentence contexts. The results revealed that, relative to congruent nouns, incongruent nouns elicited a larger N1 and a larger N400 when they were embedded in a regular-rhythm context, but elicited only a larger P600 when they were embedded in an irregular-rhythm context. This difference in the timing of neural responses to incongruent nouns suggests that a temporal rhythmical context speeds up speech comprehension. Moreover, as compared to the irregular-rhythm contexts, regular-rhythm contexts induced neural oscillatory power increases in the beta band immediately preceding the critical nouns and power increases in the alpha band immediately following these nouns. The beta-power enhancement effect induced by the preceding rhythmic context was negatively correlated with the N400/P600 enhancement effect evoked by the subsequent incongruent nouns. The above results suggest that the facilitating effect of rhythm regularity on speech comprehension relies at least in part on alpha-beta band neural oscillations, especially on beta activity; a temporal rhythmical context facilitates speech comprehension both by enhancing neural excitability associated with early acoustic-phonological processing and by reducing cognitive costs associated with later semantic resolution. The present results were also discussed with regard to the dynamic attending theory.

Dependency Structures and Beyond: Assembling Drawings of Sentence Construction

This paper purports to propose a concise system of symbols to illustrate the sentence construction through assembling drawings, in which chunks are attached step by step according to their semantic dependency relations into a partial structure, which ultimately develops into the complete structure. The assembling drawings, purporting as a supplementary yet more linearized notation of dependency structures, use semantic streams to represent the semantic dependency relations, which indicate the objective movement within a sentence; while the attachment of chunks represents the word order, indicating the subjective movement. The sentence construction is accomplished at the point when all the chunks can be integrated, and the semantic streams merge together. The performance of the assembling drawings is investigated and exemplified with a diversity of Mandarin Chinese and English sentences.

Finiteness contrasts without Tense? A view from Mandarin Chinese

Debate persists over whether Mandarin Chinese sentences exhibit a syntactically represented albeit phonologically null Tense projection. In a recent paper, Lin (Syntax 18:320–342, 2015) argues for the positive view. The argument is based on the premise that Mandarin clauses exhibit finite/nonfinite contrasts and that finiteness is a property of Tense. In this paper, I argue that the contrasts identified by Lin can all be adequately accounted for without appealing to Tense. The primary conclusion then is that finiteness contrasts do not constitute evidence for Tense in Mandarin. A secondary conclusion is that Mandarin can nonetheless be said to exhibit a finite/nonfinite distinction, but only if ‘finiteness’ is construed broadly as a cluster of properties that enable a clause to stand alone as a syntactically unembedded assertion. Phenomena considered in making this argument include both those discussed by Lin (object fronting, wide scope of object-position quantifiers, and a scopal interaction between modals and aspect) as well as the syntax of subject position and the grammar of control.

Difficulties in Comprehending Affirmative and Negative Sentences: Evidence From Chinese Children With Reading Difficulties

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.

Internal mechanisms underlying anticipatory language processing: Evidence from event-related-potentials and neural oscillations.

Although numerous studies have demonstrated that the language processing system can predict upcoming content during comprehension, there is still no clear picture of the anticipatory stage of predictive processing. This electroencephalograph study examined the cognitive and neural oscillatory mechanisms underlying anticipatory processing during language comprehension, and the consequences of this prediction for bottom-up processing of predicted/unpredicted content. Participants read Mandarin Chinese sentences that were either strongly or weakly constraining and that contained critical nouns that were congruent or incongruent with the sentence contexts. We examined the effects of semantic predictability on anticipatory processing prior to the onset of the critical nouns and on integration of the critical nouns. The results revealed that, at the integration stage, the strong-constraint condition (compared to the weak-constraint condition) elicited a reduced N400 and reduced theta activity (4-7Hz) for the congruent nouns, but induced beta (13-18Hz) and theta (4-7Hz) power decreases for the incongruent nouns, indicating benefits of confirmed predictions and potential costs of disconfirmed predictions. More importantly, at the anticipatory stage, the strongly constraining context elicited an enhanced sustained anterior negativity and beta power decrease (19-25Hz), which indicates that strong prediction places a higher processing load on the anticipatory stage of processing. The differences (in the ease of processing and the underlying neural oscillatory activities) between anticipatory and integration stages of lexical processing were discussed with regard to predictive processing models.

Tense in Mandarin Chinese Sentences

AbstractJ. Lin (2010) argues against Sybesma's (2007) proposal that Mandarin Chinese has syntactic tense and contends that it does not need tense for the temporal interpretations of sentences. This paper shows that those arguments cannot be sustained. Specifically, this paper points out the following: (i) Lin's claim that Mandarin Chinese sentences do not show tense‐related syntactic properties is wrong. (ii) The so‐called nonexistent temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences are merely a matter of choice of the reference time. (iii) Lin's argument against the existence of past tense in Mandarin Chinese is committed to the error of taking the English past tense as the only model for the tense system of Mandarin Chinese. (iv) The parallelism between Dutch and Mandarin Chinese that Sybesma observes is temporal in nature, despite the objections of Lin. (v) The temporal interpretations of Mandarin Chinese sentences can be accounted for straightforwardly by a pronominal tense system.

How and when predictability interacts with accentuation in temporally selective attention during speech comprehension

The present study used EEG to investigate how and when top-down prediction interacts with bottom-up acoustic signals in temporally selective attention during speech comprehension. Mandarin Chinese spoken sentences were used as stimuli. We systematically manipulated the predictability and de/accentuation of the critical words in the sentence context. Meanwhile, a linguistic attention probe ‘ba’ was presented concurrently with the critical words or not. The results showed that, first, words with a linguistic attention probe elicited a larger N1 than those without a probe. The latency of this N1 effect was shortened for accented or lowly predictable words, indicating more attentional resources allocated to these words. Importantly, prediction and accentuation showed a complementary interplay on the latency of this N1 effect, demonstrating that when the words had already attracted attention due to low predictability or due to the presence of pitch accent, the other factor did not modulate attention allocation anymore. Second, relative to the lowly predictable words, the highly predictable words elicited a reduced N400 and enhanced gamma-band power increases, especially under the accented conditions; moreover, under the accented conditions, shorter N1 peak-latency was found to correlate with larger gamma-band power enhancement, which indicates that a close relationship might exist between early selective attention and later semantic integration. Finally, the interaction between top-down selective attention (driven by prediction) and bottom-up selective attention (driven by accentuation) occurred before lexical-semantic processing, namely before the N400 effect evoked by predictability, which was discussed with regard to the language comprehension models.

Two-stage interaction between word order and noun animacy during online thematic processing of sentences in Mandarin Chinese

How different sources of linguistic information are used during online language comprehension is a central question in psycholinguistic research. This study used eye-tracking and electrophysiological techniques to investigate how and when word order and noun animacy interact with each other during online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences. The initial argument in the sentence is animate or inanimate and the following verb disambiguates it as an agent or patient. The results at the verb revealed that, at the early processing stage, the patient-first sentences elicited longer gaze duration and larger N400 than the agent-first ones only when the initial argument was inanimate; however, at the late stage, the patient-first sentences elicited prolonged second-pass time and enhanced P600 only when the initial argument was animate. In addition, the brain oscillations at the verb also showed different patterns in the early and later window latencies. The present results suggested that the online thematic processing of Mandarin Chinese sentences involves not only universal processing strategies (subject-preference) but also language-specific strategies as well. That is, in Mandarin Chinese, noun animacy interacts with word order immediately during online sentence comprehension; the initial processing results can be overridden by additional interpretively relevant information types at a later stage. Those results provided important indications for the language comprehension models.

The relation between thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension.

Sentence comprehension involves timely computing different types of relations between its verbs and noun arguments, such as morphosyntactic, semantic, and thematic relations. Here, we used EEG technique to investigate the potential differences in thematic role computing and lexical-semantic relatedness processing during on-line sentence comprehension, and the interaction between these two types of processes. Mandarin Chinese sentences were used as materials. The basic structure of those sentences is “Noun+Verb+‘le’+a two-character word”, with the Noun being the initial argument. The verb disambiguates the initial argument as an agent or a patient. Meanwhile, the initial argument and the verb are highly or lowly semantically related. The ERPs at the verbs revealed that: relative to the agent condition, the patient condition evoked a larger N400 only when the argument and verb were lowly semantically related; however, relative to the high-relatedness condition, the low-relatedness condition elicited a larger N400 regardless of the thematic relation; although both thematic role variation and semantic relatedness variation elicited N400 effects, the N400 effect elicited by the former was broadly distributed and reached maximum over the frontal electrodes, and the N400 effect elicited by the latter had a posterior distribution. In addition, the brain oscillations results showed that, although thematic role variation (patient vs. agent) induced power decreases around the beta frequency band (15–30 Hz), semantic relatedness variation (low-relatedness vs. high-relatedness) induced power increases in the theta frequency band (4–7 Hz). These results suggested that, in the sentence context, thematic role computing is modulated by the semantic relatedness between the verb and its argument; semantic relatedness processing, however, is in some degree independent from the thematic relations. Moreover, our results indicated that, during on-line sentence comprehension, thematic role computing and semantic relatedness processing are mediated by distinct neural systems.

The roles of fundamental frequency contours and sentence context in Mandarin Chinese speech intelligibility

Flattening the fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin Chinese sentences reduces their intelligibility in noise but not in quiet. It is unclear, however, how the absence of primary acoustic cue for lexical tones might be compensated with the top-down information of sentence context. In this study, speech intelligibility was evaluated when participants listened to sentences and word lists with or without F0 variations in quiet and noise. The results showed that sentence context partially explained the unchanged intelligibility of monotonous Chinese sentences in quiet and further indicate that F0 variations and sentence context act in concert during speech comprehension.

Recognizing syntactic errors in Chinese and English sentences: Brain electrical activity in Asperger's syndrome

This study investigates electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillatory activity in the brain for bilingual participants with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and bilingual healthy control participants during visual recognition of syntactic errors in traditional Mandarin Chinese (native) and English (foreign) sentences. Reading performance is similar for the two groups in both languages. While reading Mandarin Chinese, the control group showed a left-hemispheric specialization within the 400–600ms interval in delta synchronization. However, delta synchronizations were widely distributed in all scalp regions and lasted longer than 600ms in the AS group. One possible interpretation of our data is the hypothesis that the AS group has more difficulty in brain organization of semantic and syntactic processes than the control group when reading their native language, because Chinese syntactic structure requires more work to be done by the perceiver. Nevertheless, other brain mechanisms (e.g., top-down regulation), can partially compensate for this difficulty, allowing AS subjects to attain the same level of response activity as the controls.

Cochlea-scaled entropy predicts intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences

Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy (CSE; Stilp & Kluender, PNAS, 107(27):12387-12392 [2010]) is a measure of information-bearing change in complex acoustic signals such as speech. CSE robustly predicts English sentence intelligibility even amidst temporal distortion and widely different speaking rates (Stilp, Kiefte, Alexander, & Kluender, JASA, 128(4):2112-2126). However, CSE does not explicitly capture changes in fundamental frequency (f0) in any way distinct from that for other aspects of spectral shape (e.g., formant patterns, slope). This property of CSE could limit its ability to predict intelligibility of tone languages that use f0 for phonetic and morphological distinctions. The present study assesses the predictive power of CSE for Mandarin Chinese sentence intelligibility. Twenty-five native-Mandarin listeners transcribed Mandarin sentences in which consonant-length (80-ms) and vowel-length (112-ms) segments with either high or low CSE were replaced with speech-shaped noise. CSE reliably predicted listener performance; as greater amounts of CSE were replaced by noise, performance worsened. Results encourage information-theoretic approaches to speech perception, as change and not physical acoustic measures best predict sentence intelligibility across tonal and nontonal languages. [Work supported by NIDCD.]

Redes sociales y factor de impacto de las revistas biomédicas

This study investigates electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillatory activity in the brain for bilingual participants with Asperger's syndrome (AS) and bilingual healthy control participants during visual recognition of syntactic errors in traditional Mandarin Chinese (native) and English (foreign) sentences. Reading performance is similar for the two groups in both languages. While reading Mandarin Chinese, the control group showed a left-hemispheric specialization within the 400–600 ms interval in delta synchronization. However, delta synchronizations were widely distributed in all scalp regions and lasted longer than 600 ms in the AS group. One possible interpretation of our data is the hypothesis that the AS group has more difficulty in brain organization of semantic and syntactic processes than the control group when reading their native language, because Chinese syntactic structure requires more work to be done by the perceiver. Nevertheless, other brain mechanisms (e.g., top-down regulation), can partially compensate for this difficulty, allowing AS subjects to attain the same level of response activity as the controls.

Mandarin Chinese speech recognition by pediatric cochlear implant users

Objectives Because of difficulties associated with pediatric speech testing, most pediatric cochlear implant (CI) speech studies necessarily involve basic and simple perceptual tasks. There are relatively few studies regarding Mandarin-speaking pediatric CI users’ perception of more difficult speech materials (e.g., words and sentences produced by multiple talkers). Difficult speech materials and tests necessarily require older pediatric CI users, who may have different etiologies of hearing loss, duration of deafness, CI experience. The present study investigated how pediatric CI patient demographics influence speech recognition performance with relatively difficult test materials and methods. Methods In this study, open-set recognition of multi-talker (two males and two females) Mandarin Chinese disyllables and sentences were measured in 37 Mandarin-speaking pediatric CI users. Subjects were grouped according to etiology of deafness and previous acoustic hearing experience. Group 1 subjects were all congenitally deafened with little-to-no acoustic hearing experience. Group 2 subjects were not congenitally deafened and had substantial acoustic hearing experience prior to implantation. Multiple linear regression analyses were performed within each group using subject demographics such as age at implantation and age at testing. Results Pediatric CI performance was generally quite good. For Group 1, mean performance was 82.3% correct for disyllables and 82.8% correct for sentences. For Group 2, mean performance was 76.6% correct for disyllables and 84.4% correct for sentences. For Group 1, multiple linear regression analyses showed that age at implantation predicted disyllable recognition, and that age at implantation and age at testing predicted sentence recognition. For Group 2, neither age at implantation nor age at testing predicted disyllable or sentence recognition. Performance was significantly better with the female than with the male talkers. Conclusions Consistent with previous studies’ findings, early implantation provided a significant advantage for profoundly deaf children. Performance for both groups was generally quite good for the relatively difficult materials and tasks, suggesting that open-set word and sentence recognition may be useful in evaluating speech performance with older pediatric CI users. Differences in disyllable recognition between Groups 1 and 2 may reflect differences in adaptation to electric stimulation. The Group 1 subjects developed speech patterns exclusively via electric stimulation, while the Group 2 subjects adapted to electric stimulation relative to previous acoustic patterns.

Finiteness of Clauses and Raising of Arguments in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract. This paper argues that Mandarin Chinese clauses exhibit the finite/nonfinite contrast, and, based on this discovery, shows that the EPP is the driving force for A‐movement. The evidence is the raising of arguments from the TP complements of different kinds of modals. It is argued that the epistemic modals in Mandarin Chinese take a finite TP complement, whereas the modal hui‘will’ and the root modals take a nonfinite TP complement. Though the epistemic modals take a finite TP complement, they nonetheless permit subject‐to‐subject raising. This phenomenon can be accounted for if we assume that the EPP drives A‐movement, and agreement blocks it. Mandarin Chinese does not have grammatical features; as a consequence, the subject of a finite clause does not perform checking of grammatical features, and thus is free to raise. This phenomenon, therefore, is evidence against the checking‐based theory of A‐movement. If feature checking is involved in raising in Mandarin Chinese sentences, extra assumptions must be made, with a heavy burden of proof on the checking‐based theory.