Standard Chinese Research Articles

From ‘Born’ Bilinguals to Monolinguals: Understanding Korean‐Chinese Bilingual Family Language Policy in China

ABSTRACTIn recent years, China has implemented a national language policy promoting the use of Putonghua (Standard Chinese) in ethnic minority schools. This study investigates how mesolevel institutions (i.e., schools) have responded to this macro‐level national language policy change, and how the institutional policy changes have affected Korean‐Chinese bilingual family language policies in Yanbian, China. Based on an analysis of the teaching and learning materials used in schools and data gathered through interviews with and observations of 16 Korean‐Chinese bilingual families, this study finds that schools have actively responded to macro‐level policy changes with organised, large‐scale language practice activities. As a result of factors such as educational pressure and broader societal ideologies, families have been pressured to align with the meso‐level language policy despite their desire to maintain their heritage language and culture. Consequently, it is likely that future generations of Korean‐Chinese individuals, who would previously have been ‘born’ bilinguals, may become monolinguals. This study contends that in countries with a unified language ideology and a dominant language, the impact of macro‐level policy reforms can restrict or promote micro‐level family language policies through the mediating influence of meso‐level institutions. Family language policy researchers may need to recognise that there is a one‐way, rather than two‐way, relationship between the aims of the state and the desires of families in such contexts.

Helicopter cockpit speech recognition method based on transfer learning and context biasing

Currently, Chinese speech recognition technology is generally designed for common domains, primarily focusing on accurate recognition of standard Mandarin Chinese in low-noise environments. However, helicopter cockpit speech presents unique challenges, characterized by high-noise environments, specific industry jargon, low contextual relevance, and a lack of publicly available datasets. To address these issues, this paper proposes a helicopter cockpit speech recognition method based on transfer learning and context biasing. By fine-tuning a general speech recognition model, we aim to better adapt it to the characteristics of speech in helicopter cockpits. This study explores noise reduction processing, context biasing, and speed perturbation in helicopter cockpit speech data. Combining pre-trained models with language models, we conduct transfer training to develop a specialized model for helicopter cockpit speech recognition. Finally, the effectiveness of this method is validated using a real dataset. Experimental results show that, on the helicopter speech dataset, this method reduces the word error rate from 72.69% to 12.58%. Furthermore, this approach provides an effective solution for small-sample speech recognition, enhancing model performance on limited datasets.

Examining Malaysian Chinese Lexical Variations in Newspaper Discourse: A Standard Chinese in China Perspective

Examining Malaysian Chinese Lexical Variations in Newspaper Discourse: A Standard Chinese in China Perspective

조선족 학교 학생들의 이중 언어 태도 조사 연구

By examining the complex aspects of language use and attitudes among Korean-Chinese students living in Heilongjiang Province in China, this study aims to analyze the bilingual patterns of Korean-Chinese students from various angles and provide an in-depth understanding of their language usage patterns, attitudes toward language, and how bilingual skills are formed and developed in socio-cultural contexts. In this paper, based on the national public language supply policy at Heilongjiang Korean-Chinese School, a field survey and survey were conducted on students from Heilongjiang Province Korean-Chinese School to accurately grasp the status and attitude of bilingualism in Chinese and Korean. For the conduct of the study, first of all, the survey method and the subject of the survey were confirmed as students of 32 Korean-Chinese schools in Heilongjiang Province. Next, the pattern of bilingualism in Korean and Chinese was analyzed through a survey on language attitude, language status cause, language and character use, and language relationship. Next, the problems of bilingualism were confronted, and a strategy for optimizing bilingualism according to the cause was devised. The results of the survey showed that Korean-Chinese school students were deeply interested in Chinese and Chinese culture. In other words, it was premised that they should be able to accurately recognize the superiority of China's bilingual policy and speak both Korean and standard Chinese, which are the native languages of the Korean people, but it showed the reality that the Korean language ability was weakening day by day compared to Chinese. Therefore, in this paper, the optimization strategies for bilingualism were divided into five categories: language dissemination and education programs, socio-cultural environment encouraging language use, the development of bilingual education programs, home and community support for language use, and policy support for language preservation. Therefore, the Heilongjiang provincial government, schools, and parents should set up an environment where Korean language education can develop soundly through policies and measures to promote full promotion and distribution by developing Korean and Chinese in a balanced manner.

Speech-Language Pathology in China: An Overview

Purpose: China is a middle-income developing country that is aging rapidly. Speech-language pathology is a developing field in China. The article aims to provide a brief overview of the current status of speech-language pathology in China. Method: This article presents the authors' viewpoint, bolstered by insights from nine speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in China. To enrich the depth of the discussion on achievements and challenges within the Chinese speech-language pathology field, the authors also conducted a review of relevant articles in Standard Chinese–based databases. Result and Discussion: The authors have delineated both the major achievements and barriers in the field of speech-language pathology in China. Recommendations for improvement are included, emphasizing the importance of sustained efforts from researchers, clinicians, educators, governments, and related organizations within China. Additionally, the authors extend their suggestions to clinicians and researchers in other countries. Conclusion: While the field of speech-language pathology has substantially developed in the past 40 years, several challenges confront SLPs in China at both the educational and practical levels.

Recognizing two dialects in one written form: A Stroop study

Abstract This study aims to examine the influence of dialectal experience on logographic visual word recognition. Two groups of Chinese monolectals and three groups of Chinese bi-dialectals performed Stroop color-naming in Standard Chinese (SC), and two of the bi-dialectal groups also in their regional dialects. The participant groups differed in dialectal experiences. The ink-character relation was manipulated in semantics, segments, and tones separately, as congruent, competing, or different, yielding ten Stroop conditions for comparison. All the groups showed Stroop interference for the conditions of segmental competition, as well as evidence for semantic activation by the characters. Bi-dialectal experience, even receptive, could benefit conflict resolution in the Stroop task. Chinese characters can automatically activate words in both dialects. Comparing naming in Standard Chinese and naming in the bi-dialectals’ regional dialects, still, a regional-dialect disadvantage suggests that the activation is biased with literacy and lexico-specific inter-dialectal relations.

Contrastive Analysis of Phonological Systems —Standard Chinese and Swahili in Kenya

Contrastive Analysis of Phonological Systems —Standard Chinese and Swahili in Kenya

제2언어 습득에서의 전이 현상 연구

We are living in an era of acquiring more than two languages in an internationalized and multicultural society. As a second language in the international community, standard Chinese is still one of the languages that receives a lot of attention. This study examined the influence of the second language on the first language in the process of learning Chinese as a second language. Specifically, an experiment was conducted on the calculation of closed sounds in standard Chinese and Korean for native Chinese speakers and Korean students studying in China to compare and analyze the acoustic characteristics (H1-H2) of the vocal type. As a result of the analysis, significant changes were found in the realization of H1-H2 of the Korean stop, which is the native language, by a group of high-level speakers using a second language as a standard Chinese. These results of this study are significant as another basis for supporting the impact of the language environment faced by bilingual users on the output of second languages and the backward transfer phenomenon of their first language during second language acquisition.

The Anaphor Features and Antecedent Retrieval of Mandarin Ta

The studies of antecedent retrieval of Chinese personal pronouns have been the focus of semantic and syntactic scholars. It has also been a difficult problem for learners. This study works on the actual mastery of native Chinese speakers regarding the pronoun Ta (, he) in the third person singular in terms of anaphor features and antecedent retrieval. Two experiments, Ancient Chinese vs. Modern Standard Chinese and uncommon usage vs. common usage, reveal native speakers antecedent retrieval regarding the pronoun Ta (, he) in the third person singular. Experiment 1 found that native Chinese speakers had an error rate of about 25% when analyzing sentences containing Ta in Old Chinese and about 2% in Modern Standard Chinese. The results of Experiment 2 illustrate that native Chinese speakers made about 14% of the errors in the analysis of the uncommon usage of Ta, while only about 1% of the errors were made in the common usage. Therefore, Chinese learners do not need to know all the usage of Ta in Ancient Chinese and uncommon usage, but they need to learn all the usage in Modern Standard Chinese and common usage to achieve the goal of good understanding.

Multi-Meta Information Embedding Enhanced BERT for Chinese Mechanics Entity Recognition

The automatic extraction of key entities in mechanics problems is an important means to automatically solve mechanics problems. Nevertheless, for standard Chinese, compared with the open domain, mechanics problems have a large number of specialized terms and composite entities, which leads to a low recognition capability. Although recent research demonstrates that external information and pre-trained language models can improve the performance of Chinese Named Entity Recognition (CNER), few efforts have been made to combine the two to explore high-performance algorithms for extracting mechanics entities. Therefore, this article proposes a Multi-Meta Information Embedding Enhanced Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (MMIEE-BERT) for recognizing entities in mechanics problems. The proposed method integrates lexical information and radical information into BERT layers directly by employing an information adapter layer (IAL). Firstly, according to the characteristics of Chinese, a Multi-Meta Information Embedding (MMIE) including character embedding, lexical embedding, and radical embedding is proposed to enhance Chinese sentence representation. Secondly, an information adapter layer (IAL) is proposed to fuse the above three embeddings into the lower layers of the BERT. Thirdly, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network and a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model are applied to semantically encode the output of MMIEE-BERT and obtain each character’s label. Finally, extensive experiments were carried out on the dataset built by our team and widely used datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has more advantages than the existing models in the entity recognition of mechanics problems, and the precision, recall, and F1 score were improved. The proposed method is expected to provide an automatic means for extracting key information from mechanics problems.

Exploring Tibetan residents’ everyday language practices in Danba county, Southwest China: a case study

Abstract In this case study, seventy Tibetan residents selected from two Tibetan villages in Danba county, Southwest China, were invited to participate in an investigation of their everyday use of Tibetan, standard Chinese, and English, as well as their expectations of future multilingual practices. It was found that there are intergenerational differences in the participants’ use of these languages. This paper, in the context of neoliberal ideology and rural development, suggests that attention should be given to support local Tibetan residents’ language learning and improve their multilingual competence, thus enabling the conversion of their linguistic/human capital to economic capital. The study contributes to understandings of how local multilingual resources can be exploited for the betterment of living standards and opportunities, and it calls for governments to address the issues regarding poverty reduction, rural development, and language preservation by improving the quality of multilingual education in ethnic minority areas.

Tense as a Grammatical Category in Sinitic: A Critical Overview

Sinitic languages are very often described as tenseless, since they are generally seen as lacking ‘true’ grammatical markers of tense: thus, the interpretation of time reference relies on other factors, such as aspect, modal verbs, and the use of time expressions. However, the debate concerning the tenseless nature of Chinese has not been settled yet: several types of items in Sinitic have been analyzed as expressing both aspect and tense, tense and modality, or even tense only. In this paper, we offer a critical analysis of the proposals made in the description of Standard Mandarin Chinese and (so-called) Chinese dialects concerning grammatical exponents of tense. We shall show that there appears to be a very broad degree of variation within Sinitic in the type and nature of tense(-like) meanings expressed, with different degrees of overlap between tense and other TAM categories (i.e., aspect and modality), and different degrees of grammaticalisation of alleged tense markers. Furthermore, the most grammaticalised tense markers are located in subregions within northern China: we shall thus discuss the relevance of our data for the areal typology of Sinitic.

Variable motion encoding within Chinese: a usage-based perspective

AbstractLanguages differ considerably in the way they encode motion. Previous research on motion encoding has paid much attention to inter-typological variation (i.e., variation between language types) and intra-typological variation (i.e., variation within language types), but less focus on intra-linguistic variation (i.e., variation within particular languages). To fill this niche, the current study compares actual motion and metaphorical motion in Standard Mandarin Chinese with a corpus-based approach. We ask whether the typological properties in actual motion extend to metaphorical motion. The results indicate that the answer is negative. The typological properties including lexicalization patterns and the distribution of semantic components vary by both event type (actual motion vs. metaphorical motion) and genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) within Chinese. The intra-linguistic variation can be explained by additional factors – the pragmatic context and the structural property of Chinese. These findings support a constructional proposal of the motion event typology, which is a more nuanced typology that expands the binary distinction between V-languages and S-languages. In this proposal, the consideration of the scalar dimension enables more explicit descriptions of variation within languages (shift left- or rightward on the scale) and more accurate explanations for these phenomena.

Phonetic differences between nouns and verbs in their typical syntactic positions in a tonal language: Evidence from disyllabic noun–verb ambiguous words in Standard Mandarin Chinese

This study investigates how word categories, namely noun and verb, influence acoustic realizations (duration, F0, intensity) in Standard Mandarin Chinese, a language having phonemically distinctive tones and a simple morphological system. Noun-verb ambiguous words were selected and presented in the final positions of typical syntactic contexts in order to avoid the interference of prosodic boundary, syntactic complexity, contextual predictability, tonal environment, F0 range and syllable properties (consonant, vowel, tone, syllable length). Linear mixed models were fitted to duration, and generative additive mixed models were fitted to F0 and intensity. The results showed that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs were still evident in duration, F0 and intensity after lexical frequency, speech rate and some other related factors were taken into consideration in the models. The second syllables of nouns were longer than those of verbs, and both syllables of nouns were higher in F0 and greater in intensity than those of verbs. Since the prosodic boundary, frequency and other factors were controlled for, the phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be attributed to their differences in information load and number of syllables. This study provided evidence that phonetic differences between nouns and verbs might be driven by the grammatical classes themselves and is not an epiphenomenon of other processes.

A Mandarin Tone Recognition Algorithm Based on Random Forest and Feature Fusion †

In human–computer interaction (HCI) systems for Mandarin learning, tone recognition is of great importance. A brand-new tone recognition method based on random forest (RF) and feature fusion is proposed in this study. Firstly, three fusion feature sets (FFSs) were created by using different fusion methods on sound source features linked to Mandarin syllable tone. Following the construction of the CART decision trees using the three FFSs, modeling and optimization of the corresponding RF tone classifiers were performed. The method was tested and evaluated on the Syllable Corpus of Standard Chinese (SCSC), which is a speaker-independent Mandarin monosyllable corpus. Additionally, the effects were also assessed on small sample sets. The results show that the tone recognition algorithm can achieve high tone recognition accuracy and has good generalization capability and classification ability with unbalanced data. This indicates that the proposed approach is highly efficient and robust and is appropriate for mobile HCI learning systems.

The Leading Function Analysis of Confucius Institute Linguistic Landscape in Teaching Standard Chinese to International Learners

This paper is based on the Scollon & Scollon’s place semiotics framework combined with the Kress & van Leeuwen’s multimodal theory and Sockett and other scholars’ informal learning theories. By means of qualitative and quantitative methods, the leading function of the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape in teaching Chinese to foreigners is analyzed. It is shown that the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape plays a leading role at the initial stage of the Chinese language acquisition. This role is based on the main function of the Confucius Institute and is manifested in three mechanisms: attracting attention, shaping an image, and stimulating further learning of Chinese. The results show that to be effective in international communication, mastering Chinese should not be limited to classroom teaching, but it should also focus on various language practices outside the classroom. The linguistic landscape of the Confucius Institute serves as a supplement to classroom teaching, and the visual space it provides is obviously different from that of Chinese textbooks and test papers which are mainly focused on text reading. In addition to keywords, linguistic landscapes also provide other symbolic means, such as multimodal visual media, image symbols, plate-like structures, and color patterns. This pioneering method of teaching can greatly enhance foreign students’ cognition and understanding of the Chinese culture and their interest in learning Chinese. Linguistic landscape and Chinese classroom teaching complement each other in teaching Chinese internationally. To sum up, this research focuses on the leading function of the Confucius Institute linguistic landscape, attempting to explore its mechanism and role in the international spread of the Chinese language.

Mind the subtle f0 modifications: The interaction of tone and intonation in Sinitic varieties

Sinitic varieties are well known for their complex lexical tone systems. Lesser known is that these varieties also employ intonation for multiple communicative functions, ranging from indexing a speaker’s socio-cognitive information (such as emotions and attitudes) to signaling various linguistic information (such as asking questions, marking focus, and encoding prosodic structure). This paper reviews the multiplexing of lexical tone and intonation into the same melodic f0 signal. The main empirical focus is on Standard Chinese; whenever possible, comparisons are made across Sinitic varieties (such as Shanghai Wu Chinese and Cantonese). I will show that lexical tone constrains the changes of f0 for intonation. How tone and intonation interact, however, varies across communicative contexts and language varieties, which is also reflected in how listeners utilize the f0 information to decode the melodic pitch signal during speech processing. From a cross-linguistic viewpoint, findings on intonation in Sinitic varieties suggest 1) the need for detailed acoustic and perceptual studies to understand the subtle f0 modifications for intonation in tone languages, and 2) the importance of a comparative approach to understanding the similarities and differences of intonation in tone languages.

Le coordonnant adversatif du mandarin standard

One of the most popular morphemes signifying adversative relation in Mandarin is 但是 dànshì, which can be considered as either a conjunction or an adverb. When 但是 dànshì is used as adversative conjunction and adversative adverb, it shows different syntactic distributions. Focus on the conjunction 但是 dànshì, it allows coordination between linguistic units at various levels such as morphemes, nominal clauses, propositions, and even paragraphs. Besides 但是 dànshì, other terms like 可是 kěshì, 不过 búguò et 然而 rán’ér frequently occur in Chinese daily communication. They also express adversative meanings and assume a coordination function. In most of the cases where 但是 dànshì is used, it can be switched to its variants freely without changing the meaning, but it is forbidden in specific contexts. We will show in this article the syntactic distribution of adversative conjunction 但是 dànshì and its variants in Standard Mandarin Chinese, aiming to provide a comparative presentation of different signifiers from a distributional perspective.

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese has lexical tone, the use of f0 as a cue to illocution type may be restricted. We investigate the prosodic differences between ISQs and RQs as well as the interplay of prosodic cues to RQs. In terms of f0, results showed that RQs were lower in f0, with the f0 range on the first word being expanded followed by f0 compression. RQs were further longer in duration and more often realized with non-modal voice quality (glottalized voice) as compared to ISQs. These prosodic cues were largely manipulated in tandem (illocutionary pairs with larger durational differences also showed larger differences in mean f0; voice quality, in turn, seemed to be an additional cue). We suggest three possible explanations (assertive force, focus, speaker attitude) that unite the present findings on RQs in Standard Chinese with the findings on RQs in other, non-tonal languages.

Exploring the standard language ideology in China's language policy

PurposeThis research explores the standard language ideology in Chinese foreign language education policies. The most substantial in relation to language policy and management in regard to language ideology are beliefs associated with the values on the named language and its varieties (Spolsky, 2009). In the standard language ideology, the standard is treated as being valuable linguistic capital and possessing prestige as well as authority. Mandarin is the most well-accepted standard Chinese, and similarly, UK English or US English is the most popular and Standard English (SE) in China.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework in this research is critical discourse analysis (CDA) and discourse-historical approach (DHA) to guide the data collection and data analysis. This research will review recent and seminal literature obtained from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) on language policy in China in relation to standard language ideology. The literature also investigates Chinese state's English language ideologies using official language education policies (FLEPs).FindingsThe results show that standard language ideology is a common mindset found within official state policies in regard to SE. The authors argue that the Chinese trust on the ideology of standard language appears to not be aligned to recent worldwide trends such as globalization and multilingualism.Originality/valueThis research can provide insights into future language planning and language policy in China and shows that the future research could do more on language planning in China.