Native Chinese Speakers Research Articles

Perceptual cues used by Chinese native speakers in English /i/-/ɪ/ distinction

Native English speakers rely on spectral cues primarily and durational cues secondarily for /i/-/ɪ/ distinction whereas Chinese EFL learners tend to ignore tense-lax markedness due to a lack of lax /ɪ/ in Chinese vowel inventory and the speakers' insensitivity to formant values. Therefore, this study aims to explore whether Chinese speakers can use both durational and spectral cues for /i/-/ɪ/ distinction and whether females and males perform similarly in a perception test. The test was administered to 12 intermediate-level Chinese native speakers. Beat and bit were used as the basic stimuli and each stimulus was manipulated with seven different durations. The result showed that participants were predisposed to regard stimulus with long durations as /i/ and short durations as /ɪ/. Both the factor of gender and vowel duration had a significant effect on the correctness. Females were outperformed by males in the perception test correctness in most duration points except for very short vowels. Additionally, the size of differences between genders was larger in /ɪ/ than /i/ responses. In conclusion, although no significant spectral cue use was found with the participants, some uses of spectral cues at different vowel durations (90 ms, 390 ms, and 450 ms) were observed.

The effect of language experience on lexical tone perception

Language experience has often shown to affect speech perception at segmental levels (Holt, 2010). Whether and how language experience affect perception of suprasegmental elements is often subject to dispute (Xu et al., 2006; Peng, 2016). The current study focused on the identification and discrimination of Mandarin lexical tones by 3 groups of listeners, namely, 15 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (tonal language), 15 native speakers of Lao (tonal language), and 15 native speakers of Uzbek (non-tonal language). We ask (1) whether experience with lexical tones (tonal vs. non-tonal) affects categorical perception of pitch contours; (2) whether differences in native tone inventories (Mandarin vs. Lao) affect pitch perception. Stimuli were 7 monosyllabic snippets resynthesized from a natural Mandarin speech sample. The stimuli represented a physical continuum of pitch contours ranging from a Mandarin level to a Mandarin rising tone. Preliminary results show a strong categorical perception of pitch contours for Mandarin speakers than for Lao and Uzbek speakers, and Lao speakers exhibited stronger categorical perception of pitch contours than Uzbek speakers. The results indicate that lexical tone perception is affected by both the experience with tonal languages and one’s native tone inventory.

Asymmetries of null subjects and null objects in L1-English and L1-Japanese learners’ Chinese

AbstractBased on the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus, this study investigated the use of Chinese null arguments by advanced adult L1-English and L1-Japanese learners with Chinese native speakers as a baseline. Several asymmetries were found. First, the learners produced many more null subjects than null objects. Second, null subjects were mainly animate, while null objects were mainly inanimate. Third, more null subjects were used in non-matrix clauses than in matrix clauses. In addition, L1 did not seem to play a significant role in the learners’ use of Chinese null arguments, and the learners’ use Chinese null arguments was generally not native-like. Finally, it appears that null objects are not transferable or developmental and that infrequent use of null objects is universal in L2. It was argued that positive evidence in the target input as well as the nature of the subject and the object led to the asymmetric use of null subjects and null objects in L2 Chinese.

Lexical learning in a new language leads to neural pattern similarity with word reading in native language.

Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested similar neural activations for word reading in native and second languages. However, such similarities were qualitatively determined (i.e., overlapping activation based on traditional univariate activation analysis). In this study, using representational similarity analysis and an artificial language training paradigm, we quantitatively computed cross-language neural pattern similarity to examine the modulatory effect of proficiency in the new language. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers were trained to learn 30 words in a logographic artificial language for 12 days and scanned while performing a semantic decision task after 4-day training and after 12-day training. Results showed that higher proficiency in the new language was associated with higher cross-language pattern similarity in select regions of the reading network.

Reassembly of plural and human features in the L2 acquisition of Chinese by adult Korean speakers

This article reports on a study investigating the second language (L2) acquisition of the plural and human features in Mandarin Chinese by adult Korean speakers. Both plural and human features are represented in Korean and Chinese, but assembled in different ways. Forty-eight L2 learners at beginner, intermediate, and advanced Chinese proficiency levels and twenty-three native speakers of Chinese were tested using a grammaticality judgment task. The results show that L2 learners can successfully reassemble the two features, though L2 specific contexts and restrictions on feature realization are difficult. The advanced group has achieved native-like performance. The findings provide empirical evidence for the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009).

Chinese phonological consistency effect in native and second language learners of Chinese: An fMRI study

Abstract The neural basis of learning print-to-sound mapping when Chinese is the second language is still unclear. The present study aimed to examine the neural basis of the phonological consistency effect in non-native speakers who studied Chinese as a second language (L2 learners) for at least 1 year. The fMRI results indicated that the consistency effect occurred in the left supplementary motor area and left precentral gyrus in L2 learners, but not in native Chinese speakers, suggesting that L2 learners may utilize phonological-related regions and the motor system to facilitate inconsistent character processing. These results indicated that L2 learners used assimilation for the phonological processing of Chinese characters.

Timeline blurring in fluent Chinese-English bilinguals

Linguistic relativity effects arising from differences in terminology and syntax between languages have now been established in various domains of human cognition. Although metaphors have been shown to affect time conceptualisation, there is little evidence to date that the presence or absence of tense within a given language can affect how one processes temporal sequences of events. Here, we set out to characterise how native speakers of Mandarin Chinese – a tenseless language- deal with reference time misalignment using event-related brain potentials. Fluent Chinese-English participants and native speakers of English made acceptability judgements on sentences in which the adjunct clause started with the connective ‘after’ and was either temporally aligned or not with the main clause in terms of reference time conveyed by the verb. Native speakers of English failed to overtly report such reference time misalignments between clauses, but significant N400 modulations showed that they nevertheless required additional semantic processing effort. Chinese speakers, however, showed no such N400 modulation suggesting that they did not covertly detect reference time misalignments between clauses in real time. Critically, all participants manifested normal sentence comprehension as shown by a standard N400 semantic violation elicited by incongruent endings. We conclude that Chinese speakers of English experience difficulties locating events on a timeline in relation to one another when temporal information is conveyed by tense.

A cross-cultural pragmatic study of the speech act of complaining by native Thai and Chinese speakers

This cross-cultural study investigated the semantic formulae of complaints employed by native Thai speakers speaking Thai (TTs) and native Chinese speakers speaking Chinese (CCs). A sample of 60 native Thai speakers speaking Thai (TTs) and 60 native Chinese speakers speaking Chinese (CCs) responded to a twelve-scenario Discourse Completion Task questionnaire and ranked the severity of the offence in each situation. The complaining data were coded into 12 semantic formulae based on Murphy and Neu’s (1996), Tanck’s (2002) and Gallaher’s (2011) models. The Mann–Whitney U test was employed to find similarities and differences between TTs and CCs in the semantic formulae and a repeated measures test was employed to examine the effects of social distance and social status. The results showed that CCs complained more explicitly than TTs, since CCs perceived the offence as more serious than TTs. Although both TTs and CCs complained explicitly to a stranger of lower status, TTs complained less directly to an acquaintance of lower status than CCs did. Moreover, TTs complained more explicitly to an acquaintance than to an intimate whereas CCs complained more directly to an intimate than to an acquaintance. These findings may facilitate Thai-Chinese cross-cultural communication and even Thai and Chinese English as lingua franca (ELF) language teaching.

중국인 학습자의 한국어 연어 사용 오류 분석

중국인 학습자의 한국어 연어 사용 오류 분석

Brain Evoked Potential Analysis of Second Language Acquisition from the Perspective of Neurolinguistics

The current researches on the foreign language vocabulary attrition mainly focuses on the nature, time and order of the attrition of foreign language vocabulary, but there are few experimental researches using new technological means. In this paper, students who are native Chinese speakers are taken as the subjects to conduct two behavioral experiments and event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The results show that subjects have the attrition of foreign language vocabulary. N1 and N400 effect are found in the results of the two experiments, in which both concrete nouns and abstract nouns show the weakening of N1 component and enhancing of the N400 component. In the trend of brain evoked potential, the amplitude of N1 becomes smaller while the amplitude of N400 becomes larger. These results indicate that foreign language vocabulary leave traces in the brain when it is extracted again, and English nouns appears attrition. As the most common word class in English, the attrition time of Chinese learners to this word class is short and the attrition even occurs within three months.

Phonology, Orthography, and Decoding Skills Within and Across English and Chinese

ABSTRACTThe current study examined the construct of word-reading skills within and across English and Chinese. One hundred forty-three 5th graders who were native Chinese (Mandarin) speakers learning English as a second language completed 19 tasks representing phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding in both English and Chinese. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted within each language, and the results showed that the best-fitting model for both languages was the 3-factor model involving phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding. Across the 2 languages, the language-specific model fit better than other models with 1 or 2 language-general factors. These results suggest that word reading is not a unified, language-general ability within and across English and Chinese among Chinese children learning English as a second language. Instruction and intervention may need to target phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and word decoding in each language.

Can Cultural Affinity Promote Trade ? HSK Test Data from the Belt and Road Countries

AbstractAs Chinese culture is “going out,” more and more non‐native Chinese speakers are beginning to study Mandarin and are taking the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) test. Mandarin has become a very important trade language for the Belt and Road countries. This paper uses the difference‐in‐difference model and the Mahalanobis distance and the nearest neighbor distance matching methods to study the internal relationship between culture “going out” and foreign trade. We find that cultural affinity is an important factor in promoting trade, and that the HSK project has expanded China's exports to the Belt and Road countries. Culture's promotion effect in Asia is stronger than that in Europe. Culture's promotion effect shows the characteristics of regional differences, a time‐lag and a fluctuating upward trend. Therefore, further enhancing the international influence of its culture would help China to find a new source of export growth.

Natural Order of Non-native Phonology in L2 English Produced by L1 Korean and Chinese Adults

This study investigates whether a natural order exists for non-native acquisition in the production of English syllable coda obstruents by Korean and Chinese adult native speakers. We recorded L2 English monosyllabic words produced by 66 Chinese and 51 Korean native speakers. The recorded speech was then evaluated by 11 native-speaker listeners of English to determine the accuracy of coda consonants. The results showed that in both Chinese and Korean languages, the mean proportion of L2 forms was consistently ordered across all groups of different proficiencies: Substitution > Insertion > Deletion. Our results support the Natural Order Hypothesis that non-native phonology has the same general order, no matter what might be the language proficiency of the learners or the learners’ native language. However, the results do not support the view that this order is the acquisition sequence or the difficulty order. Other findings include that non-native phonology operates according to recoverability rather than transfer or markedness.

Speech perception for native and non-native English speakers: Effects of contextual cues

Previous studies have shown that native English speakers outperformed non-native English speakers in perceiving English speech under quiet and noisy listening conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the difference between native English speakers and native Chinese speakers on using contextual cues to perceive speech in quiet and multi-talker babble. Three types of sentences served as the speech stimuli in this study: sentences with high predictability (including both semantic cues and syntactic cues), sentences with low predictability (including syntactic cues), and sentences with zero predictability (consisting random sequences of words). These sentences were presented to native-English and native-Chinese listeners in quiet and four-talker babble with the signal-to-noise ratio at 0 and -5 dB. Preliminary results suggested that native Chinese speakers primarily rely on semantic information when perceiving speech in quiet, whereas native English speakers showed greater reliance on syntactic cues when perceiving speech in noisy situations. The difference between native English speaker and native Chinese speakers on syntactic, and semantic information utilization in various listening conditions will be discussed. [Work supported by The University of Texas at Austin, Undergraduate Research Fellowship and China National Natural Science Foundation 31628009]

A Case Study on Rater Training for Pre-service Korean Language Teacher of Native Speakers and Chinese Speakers

A Case Study on Rater Training for Pre-service Korean Language Teacher of Native Speakers and Chinese Speakers

Approaching The Double‐Nominal Construction In Mandarin Chinese Through The Semantic‐Cognitive Interaction

AbstractThe double‐nominal construction (DNC), also called ‘topic construction’, is a common occurrence in Chinese and other East Asian languages. It is characterized by two initial NPs which appear before the predicate verb. The construction has mostly been analyzed using the syntactic angle singly approach. The topic (the initial nominal phrase, abbreviated as NP1) needs to syntactically establish some connection with the comment (the rest of the construction) but this has, unfortunately, not been the case due to numerous counterexamples. This construction is so complex that other factors have to be taken into account. This paper addresses the major concern about the problem of the two Initial NPs’ transposition in various DNCs, an area that does not appear to have previously been sufficiently explored. Compared with other languages, the transposition of two initial NPs in DNC is unique to Chinese. The transposition with two initial NPs in each type of DNC performs quite differently, so we should make finer classification for DNC reasonably. In order to propose reasonable classification of DNC, we need to clarify the relationship between NP1 and the rest of the construction. Meanwhile, in order to tackle the problem of the two NPs’ transposition in a special type of DNC called dangling topic construction, we propose a more reasonable and precise interpretation of the relationship between topic and comment in this construction using the event‐based model and the event integration. This study shows how, depending on the syntactic‐semantic behavior of NP1, Chinese DNCs can be classified into three types. Finally, based on the three types of DNC proposed, a semantic‐cognitive interaction helps to explain and resolve the problem of NPs’ transposition for each type. This study, therefore, provides a unified and more developed account of Chinese DNC. Consequently, a semantic‐cognitive approach is likely to shed more light on the notion of topic construction and help understand how Chinese native speakers comprehend its structure and construct the meaning.

Cross-cultural differences in adult Theory of Mind abilities: A comparison of native-English speakers and native-Chinese speakers on the Self/Other Differentiation task.

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to compute and attribute mental states to ourselves and other people. It is currently unclear whether ToM abilities are universal or whether they can be culturally influenced. To address this question, this research explored potential differences in engagement of ToM processes between two different cultures, Western (individualist) and Chinese (collectivist), using a sample of healthy adults. Participants completed a computerised false-belief task, in which they attributed beliefs to either themselves or another person, in a matched design, allowing direct comparison between "Self"- and "Other"-oriented conditions. Results revealed that both native-English speakers and native-Chinese individuals responded significantly faster to self-oriented than other-oriented questions. Results also showed that when a trial required a "perspective-shift," participants from both cultures were slower to shift from Self-to-Other than from Other-to-Self. Results indicate that despite differences in collectivism scores, culture does not influence task performance, with similar results found for both Western and non-Western participants, suggesting core and potentially universal similarities in the ToM mechanism across these two cultures.

Change of neuronal pathways in Chinese speakers with non-fluent aphasia after therapy

Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) has been widely reported as an effective approach for improving speech production in people with non-fluent aphasia. Originally developed for native English speakers with aphasia, few has investigated its cross-linguistic effect in a tonal language, such as Chinese. In addition, despite that some studies have provided accounts for the underlying mechanism of MIT-specific behavioral change, literature on the potential white-matter plasticity elicited by the therapy is limited. Aphasia recovery has been reported to employ the perilesional areas in the left hemisphere and/or the homologous language regions in the right hemisphere. Yet, potential white-matter microstructural alteration in language-related regions in the right hemisphere after MIT received surprisingly little attention.This study demonstrated greater facilitation in recovery of speech production after MIT than conventional speech and language therapy among native Chinese speakers with non-fluent aphasia. Further, using diffusion tensor imaging technique, we revealed therapy induced changes in white-matter volumes in the well-established dorsal and ventral language stream tracts in the right hemisphere. The current study offers two accounts for the finding reported: Right hemisphere advantage for tonal language speakers and the role of formulaic language in recovery from non-fluent aphasia are discussed.

Character-complexity effects in Chinese reading and visual search: A comparison and theoretical implications.

Three eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine how the complexity of characters in Chinese words (i.e., number of strokes per character) influences their processing and eye-movement behaviour. In Experiment 1, English speakers with no significant knowledge of Chinese searched for specific low-, medium-, and high-complexity target characters in a multi-page narrative containing characters of varying complexity (3-16 strokes). Fixation durations and skipping rates were influenced by the visual complexity of both the target characters and the characters being searched even though participants had no knowledge of Chinese. In Experiment 2, native Chinese speakers performed the same character-search task, and a similar pattern of results was observed. Finally, in Experiment 3, a second sample of native Chinese speakers read the same text used in Experiments 1 and 2, with text characters again exhibiting complexity effects. These results collectively suggest that character-complexity effects on eye movements may not be due to lexical processing per se but may instead reflect whatever visual processing is required to know whether or not a character corresponds to an episodically represented target. The theoretical implications of this for our understanding of normal reading are discussed.

Quality of frequency-following response to speech sounds linked with left prefrontal hemodynamic activity using fNIRS+EEG

Quality of frequency-following response to speech sounds linked with left prefrontal hemodynamic activity using fNIRS+EEG