Native Chinese Speakers Research Articles

Speaker’s Referential Choice with Elementary Chinese Learners and Native Chinese Speakers

Speaker’s Referential Choice with Elementary Chinese Learners and Native Chinese Speakers

The flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in listening comprehension: evidence from the visual world paradigm

AbstractUsing the visual world paradigm with printed words, this study investigated the flexibility and representational nature of phonological prediction in real-time speech processing. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese listened to spoken sentences containing highly predictable target words and viewed a visual array with a critical word and a distractor word on the screen. The critical word was manipulated in four ways: a highly predictable target word, a homophone competitor, a tonal competitor, or an unrelated word. Participants showed a preference for fixating on the homophone competitors before hearing the highly predictable target word. The predicted phonological information waned shortly but was re-activated later around the acoustic onset of the target word. Importantly, this homophone bias was observed only when participants were completing a ‘pronunciation judgement’ task, but not when they were completing a ‘word judgement’ task. No effect was found for the tonal competitors. The task modulation effect, combined with the temporal pattern of phonological pre-activation, indicates that phonological prediction can be flexibly generated by top-down mechanisms. The lack of tonal competitor effect suggests that phonological features such as lexical tone are not independently predicted for anticipatory speech processing.

Adapting the Verbal-Guise Technique: A STEM-Focused U.S. Campus Community’s Attitudes Toward Nonnative Englishes

ABSTRACT This study evaluates attitudes toward nonnative Englishes among students, faculty, and staff at a STEM-focused U.S. university. The study utilizes the verbal-guise technique: Participants listened to and rated three summaries of the same short story as told by native speakers of U.S. English, Chinese, and Arabic. This adapted verbal-guise methodology allows for the inclusion and analysis of grammatical and lexical features—in addition to phonological features—in speaker recordings. Results reveal preferential bias in favor of native-speaker U.S. English, yet each nonnative English speaker was rated significantly differently. The native Arabic speaker was rated as less likeable and competent than the native Chinese and English speakers, while also receiving higher ratings in speech similarity and pleasantness than the native Chinese speaker. Participants’ attitudes toward and confidence with intercultural communication moderated ratings of the nonnative Englishes: Participants with more positive attitudes and greater confidence rated the native speakers of Chinese and Arabic higher on variables including speech pleasantness and willingness to interact. Findings suggest ways to improve attitudes toward nonnative Englishes on college campuses—STEM-focused campuses, specifically.

L2 Proficiency Level Influences Loanword Adaptation: Variable Adaptation of English Co-occurrence of Low Vowel and Nasal Into Mandarin

As the most commonly established and attested language contact phenomenon, loanwords, also known as lexical borrowings, may undergo transformations when borrowed from the source language (SL) to the borrowing language (BL). Previous studies have separately illustrated the role of perception and phonology in the borrowing process. However, the speech perception or phonology contributes more to the adaptation pattern in some cases than others. Few studies attempt to explain this phenomenon. To fill in the gap, the present study hypothesizes that differences in borrowers’ L2 proficiency level of the SL are the potential source. To examine this hypothesis, an online adaptation experiment was designed and conducted. The experiment examines how Mandarin Chinese native speakers adapt the English non-words ended in the combination of low vowel and nasal coda. The results suggest that BL monolinguals and less proficient L2 learners of the SL tend to use a phonetic mapping strategy guided by the backness of vowels, while advanced learners of the SL are more likely to adopt a phonological mapping strategy based on coda nasal place. This paper concludes by proposing that borrowers’ L2 proficiency level has an effect on the certain randomized variations in the process of loanword adaptation.

Понимание текста как феномен межкультурной коммуникации

The article examines the specifics of understanding a literary text in the aspect of intercultural communication. The purpose of the article is to show national characteristics in strategies for understanding a literary text. The results of an experiment conducted by the counter-text method, developed in the works of A. Novikov, are presented. The material for the experiment was the text “Before Dawn” by M. Prishvin, to each sentence of which respondents had to write down the first reaction that arose in their minds. The experiment involved 20 native speakers of Russian and Chinese, who are students of South Ural State University. Before the start of the experiment, foreign respondents confirmed their knowledge of Russian as a foreign language by passing the standardized test TRKI-1. Analysis of the experiment results showed that in the group of native Russian speakers the most frequent reaction is the PROGNOZ type, which is an assumption about how the text will unfold further. The respondents of this group actively engaged in dialogue with the author, and even argued with him. In the group of native Chinese speakers, the most frequent reaction was GENERALIZATION, which is a reduction of the meaning of a phrase to a more general statement. The identified differences allow us to speak about the existence of understanding strategies determined by the characteristics of national culture, including stereotypes of perception of certain phenomena that have developed during socialization. The article suggests the possible influence of the stereotype ‘Russians are a fighting nation’ on the understanding of M. Prishvin’s text by Chinese respondents. The article concludes that the knowledge, beliefs and expectations of an individual, formed under the influence of their native culture, form the basis for the interpretation of the text they perceive. In conclusion, the conditions for optimizing text understanding in intercultural communication are outlined.

Психолингвистические аспекты китайского иероглифического письма

<p>The work is aimed at clarifying the psycholinguistic mechanism of Chinese hieroglyphic writing acquisition. The psycholinguistic experiment involved a survey and questionnaire among native and non-native speakers of Chinese regarding the perception of texts in two types of writing - hieroglyphic and transcriptional — according to four criteria: 1) speed of reading texts (subjective evaluation of respondents); 2) time taken to read texts in two different types of recording (objective evaluation); 3) degree of difficulty in perceiving transcribed texts (subjective evaluation of respondents); 4) number of times reading texts in pinyin transcription required to fully understand the content of the text (objective evaluation). Eight different authentic Chinese texts of different discourses with a total of 344 words were selected for the study, with the main group of respondents being native Chinese speakers of different professions, ages and gender, with different levels of English proficiency. A total of 128 respondents took part in the survey, of whom 55 respondents were native speakers of Chinese and 73 respondents were from different nationalities learning Chinese as a foreign language. The second part of the experiment was aimed at investigating the psycholinguistic mechanism of text transcoding from pinyin transcriptional recording to hieroglyphic recording by native speakers of Chinese. The results obtained allow us to say that, on average, reading texts of different discourses in pinyin transcription is 1.7 times longer than reading texts in hieroglyphic recording, reading and understanding texts written in pinyin transcription is more difficult for native speakers than reading and understanding hieroglyphic texts, especially texts of literary (poetic), folklore and ironic discourse, and when writing hieroglyphs, semantic and graphical errors are possible.</p>

Chinese terms of address in apology and request

The aim of the present study is to explore how Chinese terms of address are conventionally used in the speech acts of apology and request from a contrastive pragmatic angle. The study fills an important knowledge gap, considering that little attention has been paid to the use of address terms in the performance of speech acts. The research presented has the following bipartite structure. First, a multiple-choice Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) was administered to a group of young learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFLLs) and a comparable group of Chinese native speakers (NSs). The DCT results reveal that Chinese NSs use address terms significantly more frequently in realising apologies and requests compared to the Hungarian CFLLs. Following the DCT, an online survey was conducted with Chinese linguacultural insiders on the use of address terms in apologies and requests. The findings from the online survey affirm that Chinese address terms serve pragmatic functions beyond mere attention-getters in the performance of speech acts. These findings not only identify the use of address terms as a prominent pragmatic feature in the speech acts performance in Chinese, but also hold strong implications for CFL education in fostering learners’ pragmatic competence.

Emotional Prototypicality Ratings for 636 Chinese Words: A Database of Chinese Words with Affective Information

Exemplars of concepts vary in their degree of prototypicality. This is also true for emotion concepts. This study presents prototypicality ratings for a large set of Chinese words. The database contains 636 potential Chinese emotion words (i.e., words that directly express particular emotions, like “高兴 happy” and “哀愁 sad”), from different grammatical categories. Native Chinese speakers rated the words in terms of emotional prototypicality. The database also contains values for valence, arousal, and emotionality. The analyses of the ratings revealed that 502 out of 636 words had a high prototypicality value (value equal to or above three on a 1-to-5 scale), the most prototypical words being negative and high-arousal words. The analyses also indicated that the emotional prototypicality of a word was positively related to both arousal and emotionality, and negatively related to valence. Among these variables, arousal was the most important contributor. Similar results have been found in studies conducted in other languages. This will be a useful resource for researchers interested in studying emotion words in the Chinese language and for those interested in cross-linguistic comparisons.

Introducing a new protagonist in L2 Chinese narratives: Syntactic construction and information organization

Building a complex discourse is not an easy task for second language learners. This study investigates how learners that have French as their first language (L1) and Chinese as a second language (L2) convey the function of referent introduction in narratives. It aims to identify which syntactic constructions are used to highlight new information and relate it to given information at the utterance level, and how learners organize information between utterances to ensure discourse cohesion. The procedure used consists of the analysis of an oral corpus collected from five groups of participants ( N = 110): French and Chinese native speakers, and three groups of learners (low, intermediate and advanced levels). The stimulus of the elicited task is a comic strip. The results show that low learners mostly follow the canonical word order, while intermediate learners demonstrate more syntactic diversity but still differ from native speakers at the discourse level. Advanced learners almost achieved native-like proficiency and demonstrated only one difference when compared with the target pattern that lies in the lexical-semantic characteristics of the predicate used.

What looks native-like may not necessarily be native-like

Abstract A substantial body of research has investigated null arguments in L2 Chinese, showing that they can be native-like. However, recent linguistic research has demonstrated convincingly that some ‘missing’ arguments in Chinese should be viewed not as ‘null’ arguments but as a result of movement and ellipsis. These advances necessitate a revaluation of the issue of ‘null’ arguments in previous L2 studies which largely overlooked the role of ellipsis in accounting for missing arguments in L2 Chinese. To fill the lacuna, this study recognises the above recent advances and examines whether missing objects in English speakers’ L2 Chinese parallel sentences are a result of verb raising and VP ellipsis and are genuinely native-like. Results of a picture-description task and an acceptability judgement task suggest that although L2ers, like native Chinese speakers, can accept and produce missing objects in Chinese, their native-like performance is driven by mechanisms different from those of native Chinese speakers (i.e., the missing objects are erroneously used as null objects in L2 Chinese). The findings advance our understanding of L1 vs. L2 different mechanisms for phonetically unrealised objects in Chinese, suggesting that what looks native-like in L2 may not necessarily be native-like.

Language Experience Modulates the Visual N200 Response for Disyllabic Chinese Words: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Prior event-related potential (ERP) research on how the brain processes non-alphabetic scripts like Chinese has identified an N200 component related to early visual processing of Chinese disyllabic words. An enhanced N200 response was observed when similar prime-target pairs were presented, but it was not elicited when native Chinese speakers read Korean Hangul, a script resembling Chinese characters. This led to the proposal that N200 was not a universal marker for orthographic processing but rather specific and unique to Chinese. However, there was uncertainty due to the absence of Korean participants in the previous research. The impact of language experience on N200 remains unclear. To address this, the present pilot ERP study included three adult groups (totaling 30 participants) with varying language proficiency levels. The participants judged if randomly presented words were Chinese or Korean, while the ERP responses were recorded. The behavioral data showed high accuracy across the groups. The reaction times differed between the groups with the native speakers responding faster. The N200 patterns varied across the groups. Both Chinese native speakers and Chinese-as-second-language learners showed stronger N200 responses for Chinese words compared to Korean words regardless of whether an adaptive or a fixed-time window was used for the N200 quantification, but this was not the case for Korean native speakers. Our cross-linguistic study suggests that N200 is not exclusive to Chinese orthography. Instead, it reflects general visual processing sensitive to both orthographic features and learning experience.

Will Using a Foreign Language Attenuate the Neophobia?

In two experiments, we tested whether using a foreign language attenuates neophobia at the lexical (Experiment 1) and discoursal (Experiment 2) levels in comparison to using a native language. A total of 687 native Chinese speakers participated in Experiment 1, and 693 in Experiment 2. All of them learned English as a foreign language. They performed paper-and-pencil tasks for measuring their neophobia toward innovative products described in either Chinese or English at the lexical and discoursal levels. Our results suggest that using a foreign language at the discoursal levels can obviously attenuate the neophobia toward innovative products. Moreover, Dual-process Model could explain the mechanisms of neophobic attenuation induced by foreign language use.

Small Talk in English and Chinese – A contrastive case study

AbstractIn this paper, we present a contrastive pragmatic analysis of Small Talk in English and Chinese. We use a radically minimal, finite and interactional system of speech acts to study DCTs conducted with U.S. American native speakers of English and native speakers of Chinese. Our analysis points to a number of important differences between Small Talk in the two linguacultures contrasted, such as a reliance on routines in English Small Talk, and an overall reliance on the speech act Remark in Chinese. The influence of the classic sociolinguistic variables Power and Social Distance for the enactment of Small Talk is also shown to be different in English and Chinese.

Chinese holistic processing: Evidence from cognitive mental architecture using Systems Factorial Technology

Previous research has presented conflicting evidence regarding whether Chinese characters are processed holistically. In past work, we applied Systems Factorial Technology (SFT) and discovered that native Chinese speakers exhibited limited capacity when processing characters and words. To pinpoint the source of this limitation, our current research delved further into the mental architecture involved in processing Chinese characters and English words, taking into consideration information from each component. In our current study, participants were directed to make the same/different judgments on characters/words presented sequentially. Our results indicated that participants utilized a parallel self-terminating strategy when both or neither of the left/right components differed (Experiment 1). Faced with the decisional uncertainty that either the left/right component would also differ, most participants processed with a parallel exhaustive architecture, while a few exhibited the coactive architecture (Experiment 2). Taken together, our work provides evidence that in word/character perception, there is weak holistic processing (parallel self-terminating processing) when partial information is sufficient for the decision; robust holistic processing (coactive or parallel exhaustive processing) occurs under decisional uncertainty. Our findings underscore the significant role that the task and presentation context play in visual word processing.

Соматический код «голова» в китайской фразеологии

The aim of the study is to identify the semantic characteristics of the somatism “head” as a part of Chinese phraseological units. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the work considers the somatism “head” as a cultural code that not only represents the essential characteristics and qualities of a person, but is also a historically conditioned, culture-specific element of the semiotic system of native Chinese speakers. The paper presents a contextual and semantic analysis of Chinese phraseological units selected by the continuous sampling method; identifies the key semantic groups (macro-fields) that determine the functional features of the head attributed to it in Chinese linguoculture due to a metaphorical and metonymic reinterpretation. It is determined that through the body code “head”, the evaluative description of a person is actualised, value parameters and reference points of Chinese culture are conveyed. As a result, the following is revealed: the semantics of the phraseological units with the somatic component “head” reflects the national and cultural specifics of the phraseological worldview of the Chinese; the head is the locus of emotions, mind, character of a person; the head represents ideas about a person’s appearance, longevity, integrity, leadership (victory).

Connectome-based predictive modeling: A new approach of predicting individual critical thinking ability

Critical thinking (i.e., CT), which is a metacognitive process, encompasses seven dimensions: truth-seeking, open-mindedness, analyticity, systematicity, self-confidence, inquisitiveness, and maturity. It enables individuals to arrive at reasonable conclusions and make well-informed decisions. Despite being regarded as a fundamental survival skill and a crucial element of higher education, the neural mechanism responsible for a highly critical brain remains unclear.To address this, we recruited 80 Chinese native speakers, half of whom majored in liberal arts and half in science. They underwent a resting-state fMRI scan and completed a classic CT scale. Using connectome-based predictive modeling, we identified brain connectivity patterns associated with high and low CT dispositions. Then a support vector machine model was trained to classify individuals’ gender and major from the top 20 edges respectively for high- and low CT networks.Results showed that the high CT network included limbic, temporal, parietal, and cerebellum lobes. The limbic and parietal lobes of high CT networks positively predicted overall and each dimensions of CT scores. Specifically, the connectivity between the left parahippocampal gyrus and right precuneus cortex significantly predicted the open-mindedness score, the connectivity between the bilateral hippocampal gyrus significantly predicted the systematicity score, and the connectivities between the right precuneus cortex and left superior parietal lobule, right middle temporal gyrus and right superior parietal lobule were found to significantly predict individual cognitive maturity. And the top 20 edges of high CT networks could distinguish participants' major but not gender, while the top 20 edges of low CT networks could not distinguish either.These above results suggest that CT dispositions can be forecasted from a person's distinctive mapping of brain connections, with the limbic lobe of the high CT network predicting open-mindedness and systematicity scores, which share common neural mechanisms with creative thinking, and the parietal lobe positively predicting self-reported cognitive maturity.

How powerful are Chinese characters' effects on children's creativity?

This paper conducts a preliminary evaluation of a learning strategy for Chinese native speakers to learn Chinese characters more effectively. The study utilizes a newly developed creative instruction approach called a Two-Stage learning Model (TSLM) and investigates its effects on students' verbal creativity and creative writing. The researchers developed this learning strategy based on children's self-generated stories, rhymes, and pictures of new Chinese characters they are learning. Learning in this manner is a natural approach because the Chinese people developed characters from drawings of natural objects, items from everyday life, and abstract concepts. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design with 54 participants (27 boys and 27 girls) in the 4th grade in an urban elementary school in Taiwan. The experimental group underwent TSLM instruction for eight weeks, and the control group received regular instruction. Participants were asked to use imagination and draw a character's picture, then explain their drawings by writing stories or making rhymes of the assigned characters. Three quantitative instruments were applied: New Creative Thinking Test (NCTT) for measuring divergent-thinking skills; Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) for evaluating creative products; and Chinese characters' recall test for assessing the number of characters recalled. Results indicated enhancement of three constructs of NCTT: fluency, flexibility, and originality. Moreover, they showed that children who underwent treatment scored higher on the creative writing tasks; the recall test results were insignificant suggesting that the difference between groups in creative performance was due to TSLM instruction. The study provides the first demonstration in real educational settings of how Chinese characters could promote verbal creativity.

A meta-analysis of training effects on English phonological awareness and reading in native Chinese speakers.

Enhancing English phonological awareness is critical in promoting native English speakers' reading development. However, less attention has been paid to the role of phonological awareness development for English language learners in a logographic context. This meta-analysis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of training native Chinese speakers' English phonological awareness and reading across age groups. Thirty-three articles, including 37 independent samples, were identified as training studies that reported English phonological awareness as an outcome measure, and 16 articles, including 17 independent samples, featured training studies that reported reading as an outcome measure. Results based on a random-effect model revealed the effect sizes for overall English phonological awareness (including English syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, and rhyme awareness) and overall reading (including word reading and pseudoword reading) were g = 0.651 (n = 3137) and g = 0.498 (n = 1506), respectively. Specifically, instructional training exerted a small impact on word reading (g = 0.297), moderate effects on syllable awareness (g = 0.468) and pseudoword reading (g = 0.586), a medium to large effect on phoneme awareness (g = 0.736), and a large impact on rhyme awareness (g = 0.948). The moderator analyses yielded several significant findings. Regarding the English phonological awareness outcome, programs integrating lexical semantic knowledge exhibited the largest trend in enhancing native Chinese speakers' skills. Among all age groups, upper elementary students benefited most from instructional training. Furthermore, more intensive training had a greater impact than less intensive training. In terms of the reading outcome, similar to English phonological awareness findings, upper elementary students realized the greatest improvements. Additionally, unpublished articles indicated a larger training effect on reading than published ones. These findings provide practitioners with guidelines for delivering effective instruction to promote phonological awareness and reading ability for English language learners in a logographic language context.

A Case Study of Individual, Linguistic and Psychosocial Factors on Heritage Language Maintenance Among Malaysian Chinese

Despite Asian immigrants have increasingly received attention in the scholarly study as heritage language learners (Lee, 2003; Kim & Chao, 2009; Dixon et al., 2012; Park et al., 2012), there is still a crucial gap in exploring heritage language (HL) maintenance among the multilingual Chinese descendants in Southeast Asia. This study intends to reveal individual influences as well as linguistic and psychosocial factors in maintaining the Chinese language as a heritage language (CHL) among the new generation of Chinese learners in Malaysia. Sets of questionnaires were distributed to 238 informants ages 16- 18 native speakers of Chinese. From the statistical analysis fact, it is concluded that 1) under the postcolonial education system, the diverse education stream or the type of school is one of the most influential individual factors on CHL maintenance level, i.e. SMJK>STPC>SMK in that order when considering the overall achievement on the Chinese language as a core subject, while age and gender had least impacted CHL maintenance; 2) linguistic factor which referring to parental language or dialects did not contribute to the differences in their CHL levels due to the fact that the Chinese language is commonly used in their daily lives and domestic domains; 3) attitudes towards ethnic identity as Malaysian Chinese and Chinese language classroom learning anxiety were significantly contributed to psychosocial factors in the given setting. It is hoped that this study helps to reinforce Chinese language maintenance to a greater connectedness between the young generation of Malaysian HL learners and the Chinese HL community.

Using information of relationship closeness in the comprehension of Chinese ironic criticism: Evidence from behavioral experiments

This study investigated whether native Chinese speakers’ comprehension of ironic criticism is constrained by relationship closeness in two experiments. In Experiment One, participants read conversations in which speakers were close or distant in relationships and made ironic or literal remarks, and then rated the degree of sarcasm, humor, and the appropriateness of each conversation. In Experiment Two, another group of participants read those conversations and answered questions by pressing the keyboard at their own pace. Ironic criticism made by close acquaintances was less sarcastic as well as more humorous and appropriate than that made by distant ones. Besides, close relationships facilitated the processing of the target sentences of ironies, and ironic target sentences were processed at a slower pace than literal ones only in the distant-relationship condition. To conclude, relationship closeness influences the comprehension of Chinese ironic criticism both in terms of its pragmatic dimensions and the costs in reading.