Taiwan Mandarin Research Articles

Word Recognition Materials for Native Speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

To select, digitally record, evaluate, and psychometrically equate word recognition materials that can be used to measure the speech perception abilities of native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin in quiet. Frequently used bisyllabic words produced by male and female talkers of Taiwan Mandarin were digitally recorded and subsequently evaluated using 20 native listeners with normal hearing at 10 intensity levels (-5 to 40 dB HL) in increments of 5 dB. Using logistic regression, 200 words with the steepest psychometric slopes were divided into 4 lists and 8 half-lists that were relatively equivalent in psychometric function slope. To increase auditory homogeneity of the lists, the intensity of words in each list was digitally adjusted so that the threshold of each list was equal to the midpoint between the mean thresholds of the male and female half-lists. Digital recordings of the word recognition lists and the associated clinical instructions are available on CD upon request.

Contrastive Focus in Taiwan Mandarin

This study investigated the production and perception of given, new, and contrastive information in Taiwan Mandarin. Spontaneous dialogues elicited through a game were analyzed to access the acoustical parameters marking different information structures. In perceptual studies, two perceptual experiments, (1) a dialogue history experiment, of which listeners identified the questions preceding the sentences, and (2) a pair comparison experiment, of which subject compared sentence with same wording but different information structures were used. The stimuli were either natural utterances form elicited spontaneous dialogues or resynthesized utterances with conflicting duration and f0 cues swapped from utterances of different information structures. Preliminary results of production experiments showed that duration elongation is a more consistent cue for marking narrow and contrastive foci than f0 range expansion. Listeners performed better in the pair comparison experiments than in the dialogue history experiment. For nature utterances, listeners were able to identify sentences with given information, given versus new information, and given versus contrastive information, but were not able to identify utterances with more than two contrastive foci. Listeners' performances declined when resynthesized utterances with conflicting duration and f0 cues were presented. When presented with conflicting cues, listeners relied more on durational than f0 cues.

When and how disyllables are contracted into monosyllables in Taiwan Mandarin

In Taiwan Mandarin, a disyllabic word or phrase is often contracted into a monosyllabic unit in conversational speech, just as “do not” is often contracted into “don't” in English. The goal of this research is to a) test the hypothesis that contraction is directly related to time pressure, and so it can be elicited in the laboratory from nonsense disyllabic units, and b) search for the underlying mechanisms of contraction. We devised four groups of nonsense disyllabic combinations according to the level of obstruction in the intervocalic consonant: (1) zero obstruction - CV+V; CV+VN; CV+VV, (2) nasal consonant - CVN+V; CV+NV, (3) non-nasal consonant - CV+CV, where C is a stop, fricative or affricate, and 4) nasal + non-nasal consonant-CVN+CV. These disyllabic units were embedded in carriers that would impose different degrees of time pressure on them. Four speakers of Taiwan Mandarin read aloud these sentences at three articulatory modes: clear, natural and fast. Preliminary examinations showed that contraction occurred more frequently as speech rate increased and as intervocalic obstruction decreased. Detailed acoustic analyses are being conducted to search for evidence of the underlying mechanism of such contraction, and the results will be reported.

Pitch production by bilingual Mandarin‐Min speakers and monolingual Mandarin speakers in speaking Taiwan Mandarin and Min

In this study, Mandarin produced by bilingual Mandarin‐Min speakers and monolingual Mandarin speakers were compared to see whether the presence of Min would pose influence on the pitch range utilized by bilingual Mandarin‐Min speakers in speaking Mandarin. The results showed that bilingual Mandarin‐Min speakers and monolingual Mandarin speakers did indeed differ in their pitch values when speaking Mandarin. Intriguingly, however, the difference did not go in the same direction for males and females. It is proposed here that the difference found in the male group was due to influence of Min, while the difference found in the female groups was due to social factors. The results of this study indicate that both language experiences and social constraints are important factors that influence a person's use of pitch.

The effect of regional dialect on the psychometric reliability and validity of two sets of Mandarin speech audiometry materials

Previous research has shown conflicting evidence on the effect of testing an individual's hearing acuity with speech perception materials created in a mutually intelligible, yet non‐regional dialect. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of using previously developed psychometrically equivalent speech audiometry materials in Mainland Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin to evaluate the speech perception abilities (word recognition and speech reception threshold) of regional and non‐regional listeners of the presented dialects. In addition, this study will investigate whether a native speaker of one Mandarin dialect is able to accurately administer and score the results from listeners of a different regional dialect. Some aspects of the listeners' performance on materials from a non‐regional Mandarin dialect were found to be significantly different statistically. However, it is unclear if such differences are large enough to make a difference in the clinical testing of speech perception. In terms of scoring accuracy, a high percentage of agreement was found between the two interpreters from different dialectal backgrounds. [Work supported by research funding from Brigham Young University School of Education]

From informational to emotive use: meiyou (`no') as a discourse marker in Taiwan Mandarin conversation

Discourse marker analysis has been widely studied, leading Fraser (1998: 301) to call this subject `a growth market in linguistics'. In our present research, we extended the study of discourse markers to the Chinese marker meiyou, which has traditionally been treated as a negator (e.g. Biq, 1989; Teng, 1973a, 1973b, 1975). The corpus studied here contains 40 conversations, totaling 482'27”. The analytical framework adopted in the study was drawn from van Dijk's model (1979), which mainly consists of a semantic/textual level (i.e. sequences of utterances/propositions) and a pragmatic/interactional level (i.e. speech-acts). A total of 141 occurrences of meiyou were identified as discourse markers in the corpus: 13 of them occur at the textual level and 128 of them at the interactional level. Thus, meiyou occurs more frequently at the interactional level than at the textual level. At the textual level, meiyou introduces an answer to a self-inquiry or self-correction. At the interactional level, meiyou mainly serves as a response to provide information, as a marker of correction/clarification or evasion, and as a response to praise or gratitude. In particular, with respect to meiyou's interactive functions, we use the concepts of preference structure (Sacks et al., 1974) and face-threatening acts (Brown and Levinson, [1978] 1987) to analyze the collected data. We further demonstrate that intersubjectification (Traugott and Dasher, 2002), a mechanism whereby meanings become more centered on the addressee, is involved in the development of the discourse marker meiyou.

Nature versus nurture: Children’s development and perception on syllable‐final nasals in Taiwan Mandarin

In Hung and Fon’s study (2006), it was found that elementary school children in Taiwan also tend to merge /■N/ with /■n/ as the way adults do, and the merging rates found in reading characters and sentences are higher than those in reading Zhuyinfuhao, a local phonetic system. However, while most adults and older elementary school children merge /in/ with /iN/, younger children have much lower merging rates for /i/ no matter under what condition. The first part of this study extends its investigation to preschoolers who have not officially learned Zhuyinfuhao. A picture‐naming task was conducted with 20 kindergarten children. The results show that preschoolers have very similar performances with the adults’ for both vowels. The second part of this study is a perception experiment. Sixty Grade‐2 and Grade‐4 students participated in the task, in which they were asked to write down the characters and phonetic symbols of the monosyllabic words they heard. Preliminary results indicate that these children are apt to treat /in/ and /■N/ words as homophones of /iN/ and /■n/ words, respectively, although such occurrences for /■/ are lower than those for /i/.

Development of speech reception threshold materials for speakers of Taiwan Mandarin

The aim of this research was to develop, digitally record, evaluate, and equate speech audiometry materials that can be used to measure the speech reception threshold (SRT) in quiet for native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. Familiar trisyllabic words were digitally recorded by male and female talkers of Taiwan Mandarin and subsequently evaluated by 20 native listeners with normal hearing at 14 intensity levels (−10 to 16 dB HL) in 2 dB increments. Using logistic regression, psychometric functions were calculated for all words. Twenty-eight words with comparatively steep psychometric functions were selected and digitally adjusted to match the mean subject pure-tone average (5.0 dB HL). This resulted in a list of words that are relatively homogeneous in threshold audibility and psychometric function slope. The mean slopes for the 28 selected male and female trisyllabic Taiwan Mandarin words were 11.3%/dB and 11.7%/dB, respectively.

Syllable-Final Nasal Mergers in Taiwan Mandarin-Leveled but Puzzling

The current study examines syllable-final nasal mergers in Taiwan Mandarin. One major finding is that the ethnic gap of syllable-final nasal mergers has been leveled. Meanwhile, the merger directions observed in the current study are in accordance with Ing (1985) and Chen (1991a) in that the syllable-final nasals tend to be alveolarized if preceded by [ə] and velarized if preceded by [i]. However, this [iN] merger direction contradicts Kubler (1985) and Tse (1992). Chen (1991a) and the current study presented inconsistent results in terms of the leading merger. Chen (1991a) suggested that [in] to [iŋ] was leading the merger while the current study suggests that the leading merger is [əŋ] to [ən].

When is a phonological rule acquired? A look at children’s production on syllable-final nasals in Taiwan Mandarin

Syllable-final nasals, /n/ and /N/, tend to be merged when they are after /i/ and ■ in Taiwan Mandarin, but in different directions. For /i/, /n/ is merged with /N/, while for ■, /N/ is merged with /n/ (Chen, 1991; Tse, 1992; Hsu, 2005). This study thus aims to examine whether children in Taiwan merge syllable-final nasals in Mandarin the way adults do. Fifty Grade-2 and Grade-6 students would read monosyllabic words, containing 3 [vowels (/i/, ■, /a/)] ×4 (tones) =12 minimal pairs differing only in nasal endings. They would repeat the words twice, once in Zhuyinfuhao, a local phonetic system, and once in traditional Chinese characters. Preliminary results indicated that Grade-2 children treated the /eN/ words very similarly to adults, although the occurrences of nasal merge were less frequent in the Zhuyinfuhao set than in the character set. For vowel /i/, however, merging of both directions could be found in both Mandarin characters and Zhuyinfuhao.

Hypercorrection in Taiwan Mandarin

In spite of a widening acceptance of attenuated retroflexed initials (zh‑, ch‑ sh‑) in Taiwan Mandarin today, there is a parallel movement in seemingly the opposite direction: a growing use of the retroflexed initials in certain contexts. A conflict between the two trends often surfaces in the form of hypercorrection, that is, incorrect substitution of the retroflexed initials for the corresponding dental initials (z‑, c‑, s‑). Labov (1973) observed a trend toward a similar kind of phonetic hypercorrection in New York City English, mainly among the upwardly-aspiring lower middle class. Though this group is also especially susceptible to the use of hypercorrect forms in Taiwan, people in all walks of life with all levels of education have been observed to use hypercorrect forms. This demonstrates, first, that the textbook forms of the retroflexed vs. dental initials are learned imperfectly by a wide spectrum of speakers of Taiwan Mandarin; second, that the retroflexed initials retain a certain cachet in marking speech as more prestigious and authoritative; and third, that retroflexion, hypercorrect or otherwise, has for many people taken on the function of simply marking formal discourse, in addition to its use for disambiguation, highlighting, and stylistic effect.

Contraction and Backgrounding in Taiwan Mandarin

Though the average speaker is often not very aware of it, phonetic contraction is a widespread phenomenon in Taiwan Mandarin; for example, ma^3shang^4 'immediately' is typically realized as [ma√ aŋ٧] or [ma√ (The symbol is abbreviated)aŋ٧] in relaxed conversational speech. The primary function of contracted forms is to background less important information, such as function words, adverbial modification, or the repeated part of reduplicated forms, thus helping the listener identify and focus on the highlighted or more important parts of the message. Due to the topic-comment structure of Chinese, in which the most important and relevant information comes last, contraction normally is not utterance-final except in the case of stable, established forms which contain a prominent, non-reduced syllable, or of parenthetical forms added as afterthoughts. Use of contracted forms varies according to the register of the discourse, the class and age of the interlocutors, personal speech habits, and emotional involvement in the subject matter. The rich system of contraction in Taiwan Mandarin suggests that it is a mixed system as regards syllable vs. stress timing, depending on the style and purpose of the discourse.

New and contrastive focus in Taiwan Mandarin

This study investigated the influence of information structure on surface acoustical parameters in Taiwan Mandarin. There were two experiments, i.e., GN and GC experiment. In GN experiment, the noun phrases placed in initial (NP1) or medial (NP2) position in a Mandarin sentence were elicited through a game. Subjects answered experimenter’s questions, e.g., ‘‘What is on pink truck’s right side?’’ according to colored pictures in a 4 by 4 matrix. New or given information was placed on either NP1 or NP2. In GC experiment, subjects corrected or confirmed expeirmenter’s description, such as Pink truck is yellow IDs right side, by placing either contrastive information on the color term and given information on noun (cg), given information on the color term and contrastive information on noun (gc), given information on both color term and noun (gg), or contrastive information on both color term and noun (cc). Results showed that the F0 range expansion and duration lengthening were observed on syllables carrying new and contrastive information. Moreover, duration lengthening is more pronunced than F0 range expansion. Furthermore, syllables with contrastive information were lengthened more than syllables with new information.

The acquisition of Taiwan Mandarin vowels by native American English speakers

Previous work on the production of English and French phones by native American English speakers indicated that equivalence classification prevent L2 learners from approximating L2 phonetic norms of similar phones and that learning French would not affect English speakers’ production of L1 similar phone /u/ (Flege, 1987). In this study, there were five subjects, including 2 advanced native American English learners of Taiwan Mandarin, 2 basic native American English learners of Taiwan Mandarin, and 1 monolingual Taiwan Mandarin speaker. The corpus were 12 English words ‘‘heed, who’d, hod; leak, Luke, lock; beat, suit, bot; peat, suit, pot,’’ and 12 Mandarin words [i,u, a; li, lu, la; pi, pu, pa; phi, phu, pha]. Both advanced and basic learners’ production of English and Mandarin words and monolingual Taiwan Mandarin speaker’s production of Mandarin words were directly recorded onto a PC. Vowel formants were taken from spectrograms generated by Praat. Preliminary results showed the vowel space of advanced learners between Taiwan Mandarin [i] and [u] was larger than that of basic learners, and closer to the Taiwan Mandarin norms. Besides, the vowel space between English [i] and [u] by basic learners was dramatically smaller than that of American English norms.

The preliminary study about neutral tone: Dialect effect between North Official Mandarin speakers in China and Taiwan Mandarin speakers

According to general theories, neutral tone is not regarded as an independent tone in Mandarin. Previous research shows that the most important characteristic of the neutral tone is that it does not have a certain target and pitch contour. (Lin and Yang, 1980) Namely, its pitch contour is uncertain, and it is weak in perception level. However, those studies ignore the variant between different dialects. Our study examined the features of the neutral tone between two dialects of Mandarin speakers and aimed at figuring out the dialect difference effect on the pronunciation of the neutral tone. Our subjects were chosen form two groups of Mandarin speakers. One group is from the North Mainland China, and the other is from Taiwan. The experiment was designed with a speak-it-out process. All subjects read a randomized script written in Mandarin, and the whole process was recorded spontaneously. The preliminary result shows that the dialect difference effect actually matters. It shows a tendency that the neutral tone has a certain target in Taiwan Mandarin speakers.

Syllable onset intervals as an indicator of discourse and syntactic boundaries in Taiwan Mandarin.

This study looks at the syllable onset interval (SOI) patterning in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech and its relationship to discourse and syntactic units. Monologs were elicited by asking readers to tell stories depicted in comic strips and were transcribed and segmented into Discourse Segment Units (Grosz & Sidner, 1986), clauses, and phrases. Results showed that the degree of final lengthening was modulated by boundary types. Lengthening before discourse boundaries was longer than that before clausal boundaries, which was in turn longer than that before phrasal boundaries. Final SOI lengthening also seemed to reflect cognitive load. At the discourse and clausal levels, the degree of lengthening is modulated by narration order. First narrations tended to have longer final SOIs than second narrations. In addition, there was also a mild lengthening effect in nonfinal SOIs, as was evidenced by the length differences in initial and medial SOIs and the differential lengthening effect regarding the positioning of phrases in a clause.

Thinking as saying: s huo (‘say’) in Taiwan Mandarin conversation and BBS talk

The research reported here is an attempt to explore the functions of shuo ‘say’ in informal Chinese speech and writing. We further probe into the grammaticalization of shuo, discussing how the various lexical, grammatical and discourse functions have come into being, with reference to the general tendencies of semantic change proposed by Traugott [(1982). In: Lehmann and Malkiel (Eds.) Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Benjamins, Amsterdam. pp. 245–272; (1989) Language 65(1), 31–55] and Traugott and König [In: Traugott and Heine (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I. John Benjamins, Philadelphia. pp. 189–218], and the metaphor MIND-AS-BODY proposed by Sweetser [(1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. The corpus used in this study contains two sets of data: non-face-to-face talk on BBS (the Electronic Bulletin Board System) and face-to-face daily conversation, mainly produced by young people in Taiwan. Our data indicate that shuo, in addition to acting as a complementizer as discussed by S. Huang [On the (almost perfect) identify of speech and thought: Evidence from Chinese dialects. (1982). Paper presented at Fourteenth International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics] and Cheng [(1997). In: Cheng (Ed.), Taiwanese and Mandarin Structures and Their Developmental Trends in Taiwan II: Contacts between Taiwanese and Mandarin and Restructuring of their Synonyms. Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Taipei. pp. 105–131], can also occur in an utterance-initial position, functioning as a marker of hearsay, and in an utterance-final position, as a marker of counterexpectation or as an intensifier. On the whole, the data suggest that the initial and final shuo's are innovations serving an expressive function. In particular, the lexeme shuo is moving from the propositional level to the expressive level; i.e., it is evolving from a verb meaning ‘say’ that prefaces an utterance conveying information into a discourse marker that encodes the attitude of the speaker toward the proposition.

Identification and discrimination of Mandarin Chinese tones by Mandarin Chinese vs. French listeners

Previous work has not yielded clear conclusions about the categorical nature of perception of tone contrasts by native listeners of tone languages. We reopen this issue in a cross-linguistic study comparing Taiwan Mandarin and French listeners. We tested these listeners on three tone continua derived from natural Mandarin utterances within carrier sentences, created via a state-of-the-art pitch-scaling technique in which within-continuum interpolation was applied to both f 0 and intensity contours. Classic assessments of categorization and discrimination of each tone continuum were conducted with both groups of listeners. In Experiment 1, Taiwanese listeners identified the tone of target syllables within carrier sentence context and discriminated tones of single syllables. In Experiment 2, both French and Taiwanese listeners completed an AXB identification task on single syllables. Finally, French listeners were run on an AXB discrimination task in Experiment 3. Results indicated that Taiwanese listeners’ perception of tones is quasi-categorical whereas French listeners’ is psychophysically based. French listeners nevertheless show substantial sensitivity to tone contour differences, though to a lesser extent than Taiwanese listeners. Thus, the findings suggest that despite the lack of lexical tone contrasts in the French language, French listeners are not absolutely “deaf” to tonal variations. They simply fail to perceive tones along the lines of a well-defined and finite set of linguistic categories.

Investigating the Phonetics of Mandarin Tone Sandhi

The goal of this paper is to discuss phonetic evidence relating to the production of tone sandhi in Mandarin. Two views of tone sandhi are contrasted: the standard ”categorical” view, whereby tone 3 sandhi is treated similarly to a/an allomorphy in English, and an alternative ”gradient” view, which treats tone 3 sandhi as similar to flapping in English. Evidence is presented for two main claims. First, based on a review of the phonetic literature, it appears that native speakers of Beijing Mandarin process tone sandhi more in line with the gradient view, while speakers of other varieties (including Taiwan Mandarin) process tone sandhi in accordance with the categorical view. Second, a new phonetic study of both tone 3 sandhi and the idiosyncratic tone sandhi found with the morpheme yi (”one”) provides further support for the claim of categoricality of tone 3 sandhi in Taiwan Mandarin, yet also illustrates the empirical and theoretical pitfalls of phonetic research on tone sandhi.

The Phonological Representation of Taiwan Mandarin Vowels: A Psycholinguistic Study

One of the fundamental goals of every phonological theory is to account for the nature of the basic units of speech sounds, and the relationships between these units and their contextual variants. This relationship is equally crucial to phonological theory whether it is called `phonemes and allophones', `underlying and surface forms', or `input and output'. However, purely structural analyses of phonological systems can often produce several hypotheses regarding the phonemic inventory and its surface reflexes in any particular language, all of which are supportable by the contrast and alternation patterns of the language. In this paper we look at four such hypotheses regarding the underlying vowel system of Mandarin, all based on Beijing Mandarin: the six-vowel system of C. Cheng (1973), the five-vowel systems of R. Cheng (1966) and of Lin (1989), and the four-vowel system of Wu (1994). We then present distributional, phonetic, and psycholinguistic evidence (the latter based on a corpus of 238 syntagmatic speech errors or `slips of the tongue' involving vowels) that the vowel system of the dialect of Mandarin currently spoken in Taiwan cannot be accounted for by any of these hypotheses. We then propose a new 5-vowel system for Taiwan Mandarin, based on the distributional, phonetic, and especially the psycholinguistic facts. We conclude that phonological theories which are compatible with psycholinguistic evidence such as the data presented here are those most likely to be modeling the actual cognitive representations and processes of real speakers.