Native Mandarin Research Articles

Effects of Homophone Priming on the Decision-Making in Perceptual Color Recognition of Mandarin Speakers

This study delves into the nuanced interactions between language, cognition, and perception by examining the impact of homophones on decision-making and perceptual color recognition among native Mandarin speakers. Drawing on theories of linguistic relativity and cognitive processing, this research hypothesized that homophonic primes would subtly influence both decision-making processes and color recognition tasks. Participants were assigned at random to surveys where they were unknowingly exposed to stimuli with and without homophonic primes before engaging in color recognition tasks involving subtle shade differentiations. Contrary to initial expectations, statistical analysis revealed no significant differences in decision-making accuracy between conditions, suggesting that homophones may not overtly affect conscious decision-making processes in our bilingual cohort. However, intriguing variations emerged in the perceptual color recognition task, where participants exposed to homophonic primes showed tendencies to perceive color shades more similarly compared to those in the control condition. This finding implies a potential cognitive load effect or subtle priming influence on perceptual categorization tied to linguistic structures. The implications of these findings challenge traditional views on language's role in shaping cognitive processes, highlighting the complexity of how linguistic structures such as homophones may operate at subconscious levels. The study contributes to ongoing debates in cognitive science and linguistics by underscoring the need for nuanced approaches to understanding cross-linguistic cognitive mechanisms. Future research should further explore the Whorfian hypothesis within bilingual contexts, considering additional variables such as language proficiency and cultural influences to elucidate the intricate relationship between language and cognition.

Perception and imitation of period-doubled phonation: Pitch and voice qualitya).

Period-doubled phonation, henceforth, period doubling, characterized by voicing periods that alternate in amplitudes and/or frequencies, is often perceived rough and with an indeterminate pitch. Lower pitch percept has been suggested by past studies when the degree of amplitude or frequency modulation increases. However, how listeners use period doubling when identifying linguistic tones remains unclear. The current study uses tasks of categorization with training, followed by imitation of tones manipulated with period doubling (with amplitude and frequency modulation, both separately and jointly) in a novel language. Native Mandarin and English speakers with different levels of music experience were tested. I show that period doubling leads to a low-tone bias in perception and imitation, especially as the modulation degree, particularly that of frequency, increases. Interestingly, interactions with stimulus f0 and modulation type show that in amplitude-modulated tokens, when compared to lower f0 (200 Hz), higher f0 (300 Hz) drives more low-tone responses. Period doubling is also imitated with lowered f0 and creaky quality. Language and music experience does not affect perceptual and imitative responses, suggesting that the perception of period doubling is not language-specific or conditioned by tonal knowledge. Period doubling likely signals low tones, even when the original f0 is high.

Crossmodal correspondence between lexical tones and visual motions: a forced-choice mapping task on Mandarin Chinese

Abstract Crossmodal correspondence refers to the phenomenon in which individuals match stimulus features (e.g., auditory pitch) with different sensory modalities (e.g., visual size). While studies on correspondences exhibited by suprasegmentals have mostly focused on pitch-size and pitch-shape associations, audiospatial binding observed in the production and perception of Mandarin tones, where pitch of the syllable distinguishes word meanings, sheds light on the symbolic potential of auditory pitch. In the present study, a forced-choice mapping task was conducted in the form of a word guessing game, where native Mandarin listeners select the meaning of an auditory “alien” word from two visual motions. The results showed that: (1) listeners reliably match auditory tones with visual motions in the way that pitch trajectories are congruent with spatial movements, (2) vowel category impacts tone-motion correspondence when syllables are articulated in non-contour tones, and (3) the capacities in driving the tone-motion correspondence are different across tonal categories. These findings further contribute to our understanding of the sound symbolic potential of lexical tones and expand the boundary of crossmodal correspondence that can be demonstrated by pitch.

Acoustic Analyses of L1 and L2 Vowel Interactions in Mandarin–Cantonese Late Bilinguals

While the focus of bilingual research is frequently on simultaneous or early bilingualism, the interactions between late bilinguals’ first language (L1) and second language (L2) have rarely been studied previously. To fill this research gap, the aim of the current study was to investigate the production of vowels in the L1 Mandarin and L2 Cantonese of Mandarin–Cantonese late bilinguals in Hong Kong. A production experiment was conducted with 22 Mandarin–Cantonese bilinguals, as well as with 20 native Mandarin speakers and 21 native Cantonese speakers. Acoustic analyses, including formants of and Euclidean distances between the vowels, were performed. Both vowel category assimilation and dissimilation were noted in the Mandarin–Cantonese bilinguals’ L1 and L2 vowel systems, suggesting interactions between the bilinguals’ L1 and L2 vowel categories. In general, the findings are in line with the hypotheses of the Speech Learning Model and its revised version, which state that L1–L2 phonetic interactions are inevitable, as there is a common phonetic space for storing the L1 and L2 phonetic categories, and that learners always have the ability to adapt their phonetic space. Future studies should refine the data elicitation method, increase the sample size and include more language pairs to better understand L1 and L2 phonetic interactions.

The Accompanying Effect in Responses to Auditory Perturbations: Unconscious Vocal Adjustments to Unperturbed Parameters.

The present study examined whether participants respond to unperturbed parameters while experiencing specific perturbations in auditory feedback. For instance, we aim to determine if speakers adjust voice loudness when only pitch is artificially altered in auditory feedback. This phenomenon is referred to as the "accompanying effect" in the present study. Thirty native Mandarin speakers were asked to sustain the vowel /ɛ/ for 3 s while their auditory feedback underwent single shifts in one of the three distinct ways: pitch shift (±100 cents; coded as PT), loudness shift (±6 dB; coded as LD), or first formant (F1) shift (±100 Hz; coded as FM). Participants were instructed to ignore the perturbations in their auditory feedback. Response types were categorized based on pitch, loudness, and F1 for each individual trial, such as Popp_Lopp_Fopp indicating opposing responses in all three domains. The accompanying effect appeared 93% of the time. Bayesian Poisson regression models indicate that opposing responses in all three domains (Popp_Lopp_Fopp) were the most prevalent response type across the conditions (PT, LD, and FM). The more frequently used response types exhibited opposing responses and significantly larger response curves than the less frequently used response types. Following responses became more prevalent only when the perturbed stimuli were perceived as voices from someone else (external references), particularly in the FM condition. In terms of isotropy, loudness and F1 tended to change in the same direction rather than loudness and pitch. The presence of the accompanying effect suggests that the motor systems responsible for regulating pitch, loudness, and formants are not entirely independent but rather interconnected to some degree.

THE ROLE OF L1 PROSODY IN L2 VOWEL DURATION PRODUCTION: EVIDENCE FROM ASIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

The pre-fortis clipping pattern refers to vowels being shorter before voiceless consonants compared to vowels before voiced consonants. This study examined whether first-language (L1) prosodic properties affect the production of this vowel duration pattern in second-language (L2) English speech. Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese with varying English proficiency participated in a production experiment. Results showed that while speakers exhibited some pre-fortis clipping, there were no significant vowel lengthening patterns. Additional analysis revealed subtle differences based on the L1 prosody type. Native Mandarin and Vietnamese speakers, with lexical tone, had similar duration ratios. However, native Korean speakers, with no tone, showed less distinction in vowel duration by consonant voicing. Japanese speakers, with pitch accents, fell in the middle. The findings provide limited evidence that L1 prosody affects L2 vowel duration production. The results have implications for theories of L2 speech acquisition as well as pedagogical techniques when teaching English vowels.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0711/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Graded phonological neighborhood effects on lexical retrieval: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

How phonological neighborhood affects lexical retrieval can shed important light on lexical organization and processing. Yet these effects are unclear, particularly in Mandarin Chinese. This is likely because the working definition of phonological neighbors (i.e., the one-phoneme edit rule) used in Indo-European languages inadequately characterizes the phonological similarity among Mandarin words, which have simpler syllable structures and lexical tones. The current study proposes a graded Mandarin phonological neighborhood and investigates the impacts of near-to-distant Mandarin phonological neighbors on lexical retrieval. In Study 1, we investigated how Mandarin phonological similarity is influenced by the editing of lexical tone, constituent (onset/rime, initial/final) and phoneme. Native Mandarin speakers rated the similarity between the edited monosyllabic words. We found that constituent-edit neighbors were rated as the most dissimilar, followed by phoneme-edit neighbors, while tone-edit neighbors were the most similar. In Study 2, we calculated the constituent-, phoneme- and tone-edit phonological neighborhood densities and frequencies for 4,706 monosyllabic Mandarin words. We then utilized extant datasets to examine how the density and frequency of neighbors at varied distances, as well as of homophonic neighbors, impact response latencies in word naming, visual lexical decision, and picture naming tasks. The results showed that graded phonological neighbors had differential impacts on lexical retrieval efficiency: distant (constituent-edit) neighbors facilitated word retrieval, while near (phoneme-, tone-edit and homophonic) neighbors had inhibitory effects. We discuss these findings within an interactive activation and competition framework and suggest future directions to study the representation and processing of the Mandarin phonological lexicon.

Effects of auditory processing ability on the phonological and acoustic processing of Mandarin tone by Thai speakers: An ERP study

This study investigated how Mandarin-naïve Thai speakers’ auditory processing ability affects their phonological and acoustic processing of Mandarin tone. The participants were 20 native Mandarin speakers and 19 Mandarin-naïve Thai speakers. A 10-step computer synthesized Tone 1 (T1)–Tone 2 (T2) continuum was manipulated for identification task. The stimulus 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 from the T1–T2 continuum were used in a multi-feature passive oddball ERP paradigm, encompassing within-category and across-category stimuli with equivalent large-scale and small-scale acoustic intervals. We used pitch discrimination, melody reproduction, and rhythm reproduction to assess participants’ auditory processing ability. The identification results showed that Mandarin-naïve Thai speakers’ exhibit a weaker categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin tones compared to the native Mandarin speakers, a pattern consistent with ERP results observed at both sensor and source levels. Further analysis revealed higher auditory processing ability leads to enhanced CP of Mandarin tone for learners from Thai, and the same improvement is observed in the melody memory for acoustic processing of Mandarin tone. These findings add to our understanding on how individual differences influence phonological and acoustic processing of Mandarin tone during the initial stage of second speech learning.

The Effect of Pitch Accent on the Perception of English Lexical Stress: Evidence from English and Mandarin Chinese Listeners

The relative weighting of f0 and vowel reduction in English spoken word recognition at the sentence level were investigated in one two-alternative forced-choice word identification experiment. In the experiment, an H* pitch-accented or a deaccented word fragment (e.g., AR- in the word archive) was presented at the end of a carrier sentence for identification. The results of the experiment revealed differences in the cue weighting of English lexical stress perception between native and non-native listeners. For native English listeners, vowel quality was a more prominent cue than f0, while native Mandarin Chinese listeners employed both vowel quality and f0 in a comparable fashion. These results suggested that (a) vowel reduction is superior to f0 in signaling initial stress in the words and (b) f0 facilitates the recognition of word initial stress, which is modulated by first language.

Speech decoding using cortical and subcortical electrophysiological signals.

Language impairments often result from severe neurological disorders, driving the development of neural prosthetics utilizing electrophysiological signals to restore comprehensible language. Previous decoding efforts primarily focused on signals from the cerebral cortex, neglecting subcortical brain structures' potential contributions to speech decoding in brain-computer interfaces. In this study, stereotactic electroencephalography (sEEG) was employed to investigate subcortical structures' role in speech decoding. Two native Mandarin Chinese speakers, undergoing sEEG implantation for epilepsy treatment, participated. Participants read Chinese text, with 1-30, 30-70, and 70-150 Hz frequency band powers of sEEG signals extracted as key features. A deep learning model based on long short-term memory assessed the contribution of different brain structures to speech decoding, predicting consonant articulatory place, manner, and tone within single syllable. Cortical signals excelled in articulatory place prediction (86.5% accuracy), while cortical and subcortical signals performed similarly for articulatory manner (51.5% vs. 51.7% accuracy). Subcortical signals provided superior tone prediction (58.3% accuracy). The superior temporal gyrus was consistently relevant in speech decoding for consonants and tone. Combining cortical and subcortical inputs yielded the highest prediction accuracy, especially for tone. This study underscores the essential roles of both cortical and subcortical structures in different aspects of speech decoding.

The perception of Mandarin speech conveying communicative functions in Chinese heroin addicts.

Drug addiction can cause severe damage to the human brain, leading to significant problems in cognitive processing, such as irritability, speech distortions, and exaggeration of negative stimuli. Speech plays a fundamental role in social interaction, including both the production and perception. The ability to perceive communicative functions conveyed through speech is crucial for successful interpersonal communication and the maintaining good social relationships. However, due to the limited number of previous studies, it remains unclear whether the cognitive disorder caused by drug addiction affects the perception of communicative function conveyed in Mandarin speech. To address this question, we conducted a perception experiment involving sixty male participants, including 25 heroin addicts and 35 healthy controls. The experiment aimed to examine the perception of three communicative functions (i.e., statement, interrogative, and imperative) under three background noise conditions (i.e., no noise, SNR [Signal to Noise Ratio] = 10, and SNR = 0). Eight target sentences were first recorded by two native Mandarin speakers for each of the three communicative functions. Each half was then combined with Gaussian White Noise under two background noise conditions (i.e., SNR = 10 and SNR = 0). Finally, 48 speech stimuli were included in the experiment with four options provided for perceptual judgment. The results showed that, under the three noise conditions, the average perceptual accuracies of the three communicative functions were 80.66% and 38% for the control group and the heroin addicts, respectively. Significant differences were found in the perception of the three communicative functions between the control group and the heroin addicts under the three noise conditions, except for the recognition of imperative under strong noise condition (i.e., SNR = 0). Moreover, heroin addicts showed good accuracy (around 50%) in recognizing imperative and poor accuracy (i.e., lower than the chance level) in recognizing interrogative. This paper not only fills the research gap in the perception of communicative functions in Mandarin speech among drug addicts but also enhances the understanding of the effects of drugs on speech perception and provides a foundation for the speech rehabilitation of drug addicts.

Modelling Mandarin tone perception-production link through critical perceptual cues.

Theoretical accounts posit a close link between speech perception and production, but empirical findings on this relationship are mixed. To explain this apparent contradiction, a proposed view is that a perception-production relationship should be established through the use of critical perceptual cues. This study examines this view by using Mandarin tones as a test case because the perceptual cues for Mandarin tones consist of perceptually critical pitch direction and noncritical pitch height cues. The defining features of critical and noncritical perceptual cues and the perception-production relationship of each cue for each tone were investigated. The perceptual stimuli in the perception experiment were created by varying one critical and one noncritical perceptual cue orthogonally. The cues for tones produced by the same group of native Mandarin participants were measured. This study found that the critical status of perceptual cues primarily influenced within-category and between-category perception for nearly all tones. Using cross-domain bidirectional statistical modelling, a perception-production link was found for the critical perceptual cue only. A stronger link was obtained when within-category and between-category perception data were included in the models as compared to using between-category perception data alone, suggesting a phonetically and phonologically driven perception-production relationship.

Constructing a 30-item test for character amnesia in Chinese

AbstractIn the digital age, handwriting literacy has declined to a worrying degree, especially in non-alphabetic writing systems. In particular, Chinese (and also Japanese) handwriters have suffered from character amnesia (提笔忘字), where people cannot correctly produce a character though they can recognize it. Though character amnesia is widespread, there is no diagnostic test for it. In this study, we developed a fast and practical test for an individual’s character amnesia rate calibrated for adult native speakers of Mandarin. We made use of a large-scale handwriting database, where 42 native Mandarin speakers each handwrote 1200 characters from dictation prompts (e.g., 水稻的稻, read shui3 dao4 de1dao4 meaning “rice from the word rice-plant”). After handwriting, participants were presented with the target character and reported whether their handwriting was correct, they knew the character but could not fully handwrite it (i.e., character amnesia), or they did not understand the dictation phrase. We used a two-parameter Item Response Theory to model correct handwriting and character amnesia responses, after excluding the don’t-know responses. Using item characteristics estimated from this model, we investigate the performance of short-form tests constructed with random, maximum discrimination, and diverse difficulty subsetting strategies. We construct a 30-item test that can be completed in about 15 min, and by repeatedly holding out subsets of participants, estimate that the character amnesia assessments from it can be expected to correlate between r = 0.82 and r = 0.89 with amnesia rates in a comprehensive 1200 item test. We suggest that our short test can be used to provide quick assessment of character amnesia for adult Chinese handwriters and can be straightforwardly re-calibrated to prescreen for developmental dysgraphia in children and neurodegenerative diseases in elderly people.

Analysis of Mandarin Monophthong Production by Intermediate-Level Learners

Abstract This study aims to document the pronunciation status and methods of Mandarin by intermediate-level learners in order to meet the practical requirements of high-precision phonetic recognition for these learners. The research investigates the formant resonance patterns and acoustic vowel charts of Mandarin pronunciation by intermediate-level learners, calculating the Euclidean distance and vowel duration parameters in both standard and non-standard Mandarin for each vowel. The trajectory and pronunciation morphology of the learners acquiring Mandarin monophthongs were thus derived. Notably, it was discovered that the Euclidean distance between the basic vowels of intermediate-level learners and native Mandarin speakers generally decreases as proficiency in Mandarin increases. Additionally, it was observed that, during the process of Mandarin acquisition by learners, there were both "similar vowels" and "unfamiliar vowels" which presented varying degrees of acquisition ease, and certain phenomena that neither the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) nor the Speech Learning Model (SLM) could predict.

Carbon Sequestration by Mandarin Tree in Nepal: An Empirical Study

Nepal has immense potential of fruit tree cultivation. These fruit trees are a good source of carbon reserve. But these fruit orchards do not account for carbon trade in Nepal. This could be due to limited information on carbon sequestered by these commodities. An empirical study on the amount of carbon sequestered by mandarin trees at Dhankuta was conducted using both seedling and grafted 70 mandarin trees of 8-50 years of age. The amount of carbon sequestered was 0.24-1.22 ton/ha by native mandarin variety cv. Khoku local in Dhankuta district Nepal. The rate of carbon accumulation is around 0.02 t/ha/yr. This kind of study needs to be carried out in different parts of the country to make robust estimation using different types of citrus species and their varieties. Further, government of Nepal should consider fruit orchard while doing carbon trading business.

Performance of single-channel speech enhancement algorithms on Mandarin listeners with different immersion conditions in New Zealand English

Speech enhancement (SE) is a widely used technology to improve the quality and intelligibility of noisy speech. So far, SE algorithms were designed and evaluated on native listeners only, but not on non-native listeners who are known to be more disadvantaged when listening in noisy environments. This paper investigates the performance of five widely used single-channel SE algorithms on early-immersed New Zealand English (NZE) listeners and native Mandarin listeners with different immersion conditions in NZE under negative input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by conducting a subjective listening test in NZE sentences. The performance of the SE algorithms in terms of speech intelligibility in the three participant groups was investigated. The result showed that the early-immersed group always achieved the highest intelligibility. The late-immersed group outperformed the non-immersed group for higher input SNR conditions, possibly due to the increasing familiarity with the NZE accent, whereas this advantage disappeared at the lowest tested input SNR conditions. The SE algorithms tested in this study failed to improve and rather degraded the speech intelligibility, indicating that these SE algorithms may not be able to reduce the perception gap between early-, late- and non-immersed listeners, nor able to improve the speech intelligibility under negative input SNR in general. These findings have implications for the future development of SE algorithms tailored to Mandarin listeners, and for understanding the impact of language immersion on speech perception in noise.

On Some Possible Differences between Punctuation Marks in the Chinese and Spanish Languages

Languages vary in spelling and grammar. Starting from Didactics in the field of Language and Applied Linguistics, our research is conducted on suprasegmental features: contrastive analysis for future Spanish teachers to native Mandarin speakers. Punctuation marks are essential for correctly understanding any written text in any language. However, they are not the same for each language, nor do they have the same usage or form. This work formulates a research proposal to compare the following punctuation marks in Chinese and Spanish: period or full stop, comma, question marks, and hyphen, which are the most commonly used and, above all, because the differences between them are more representative. To achieve this objective, it starts from the deficiencies in the use of these marks in both languages and reflection on the historical ignorance regarding their usage, form, and possible similarities between Chinese and Spanish segments. We conclude with the idea that the formal dissimilarity between certain Spanish and Chinese punctuation marks, such as the full stop and the question mark, does not cause extraordinary difficulties for Chinese speakers in acquiring their correct use in Spanish. Those signs whose forms share similarities, such as the comma and quotation marks, do represent acquisition difficulties. In order to specify the scope of this phenomenon on punctuation, in the future it will logically be necessary to study more punctuation signs, such as semicolons, colons, as well as ellipses.

Extensive residence in a second language environment modifies perceptual strategies for suprasegmental categorization.

Languages differ in the importance of acoustic dimensions for speech categorization. This poses a potential challenge for second language (L2) learners, and the extent to which adult L2 learners can acquire new perceptual strategies for speech categorization remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of extensive English L2 immersion on speech perception strategies and dimension-selective-attention ability in native Mandarin speakers. Experienced first language (L1) Mandarin speakers (length of U.K. residence > 3 years) demonstrated more native-like weighting of cues to L2 suprasegmental categorization relative to inexperienced Mandarin speakers (length of residence < 1 year), weighting duration more highly. However, both the experienced and the inexperienced Mandarin speakers continued to weight duration less highly and pitch more highly during musical beat categorization and struggled to ignore pitch and selectively attend to amplitude in speech, relative to native English speakers. These results suggest that adult L2 experience can lead to retuning of perceptual strategies in specific contexts, but global acoustic salience is more resistant to change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese.

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the real-world plausibility of the meaning-the prior-and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy-channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy-channel proposal is robust.

Performance of speech enhancement algorithms on the speech intelligibility of native Mandarin listeners immersed in English-speaking environment

Speech enhancement algorithms have been developed to improve speech intelligibility for listeners under noisy conditions. However, all existing algorithms were evaluated only by native listeners, the performance of such algorithms on non-native listeners was rarely investigated. This study conducts a subjective listening test on native New Zealand English listeners and native Mandarin listeners who have been immersed in New Zealand English-speaking environment for more than one year. The participants were asked to transcribe noisy English sentences processed by five widely used single-channel speech enhancement algorithms. The speech intelligibility of the two groups was quantified and compared to investigate the effectiveness of the speech enhancement algorithms on non-native listeners who are familiar with the target language.