Chinese Word Research Articles

When West Meets East: Uncovering the Chinese Perspective on Design and Designing

: Although Chinese designers are gaining international recognition, design research (the study of design and designing) is still informed by a predominantly Western perspective. In this paper, we explore how taking into consideration the Chinese perspective can advance design research, by challenging and expanding prevailing understandings of design and designing. We first uncover the Chinese perspective, by tracing the emergence of modern design in China, discussing the meaning of the Chinese word for design, shè jì (设计), and elaborating some important aspects of the Chinese traditional culture (harmony, holism, and change) that influence Chinese design practices. We then argue how this Chinese perspective can foster connections between diverse paradigms of design research, counter the tendency toward reductionism in design research, and encourage experimentation in design research methods. This paper contributes to advance design research through inclusion of the Chinese perspective. By so doing, it also sustains the agenda of decolonizing design research.

A Study of Colour Words in Chinese, Tibetan and Yi Languages

Chinese, Tibetan and Yi belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, and there are kinship between the three languages. By comparing and analysing the colour words of Chinese, Tibetan and Yi, we can understand the three languages' respective lexical features and unique cultural traditions, and find out the unique expressions and cultural connotations of the colour words of the three languages. Han, Tibetan and Yi are all important parts of the Chinese Minzu, and all have their own unique language systems and colourful cultures. Colour words, as an important carrier of language system and culture, carry the linguistic and cultural characteristics of each language, and this paper will start from the colour words of Chinese, Tibetan and Yi languages to explore the three linguistic features and cultural connotations

Research on Harmonized Words in Social Networks from the Perspective of Modern Chinese Language

The popularity of social networks in modern Chinese has had a far-reaching impact on the development of language. This study discusses the unique language phenomenon of social network homophones from the perspective of modern Chinese. By collecting and analyzing data from different social network platforms, we deeply studied the phonetic features, morphological features and usage of social network homophones. The research results show the importance of social network homophonic words in modern Chinese, and emphasize their cultural and social significance as part of social media interaction. Future research can further explore the language evolution trend of social network homophones and their broader relationship with the development of Chinese language. This study provides a new perspective for us to understand the evolution of Chinese language in the digital age.

Processing Mandarin Chinese Compound Words by Native Speakers and Second Language Learners: Word Frequency, Semantic Transparency, and Word Structure

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used hybrid representation when identifying high-frequency words and whole-word representation when identifying low-frequency words. Besides, semantic transparency might impact word structure awareness, and subject-predicate words were the most difficult to process. The research also showed that L2 learners’ word frequency effect was more robust than NSs’; morpheme location information might affect NSs, but L2 learners could not process it. There was variation in NSs’ speed in recognizing transparent and obscure words, but there was no difference among L2 learners. Besides, L2 learners’ word recognition speed could not reach the levels of NSs.

Competition between parts and whole: A new approach to Chinese compound word processing.

How compound words are processed remains a central question in research on Chinese reading. The Chinese reading model assumes that all possible words sharing characters are activated during word processing and these activated words compete for a winner (Li & Pollatsek, 2020). The present studies aimed to examine whether embedded component words compete with whole compound words in Chinese reading. In Study 1, we analyzed two existing lexical decision databases and revealed inhibitory effects of component-word frequency and facilitative effects of character frequency on the first components. In Study 2, we conducted two factorial experiments to further examine the effects of first component-word frequency, with character frequencies controlled. The results consistently indicated significant inhibitory effects of component-word frequency. Collectively, these findings support the theoretical proposition that both component words and compound words are activated and engage in competition during word processing. This provides a new approach to compound word processing in Chinese reading and a possible solution to mixed results of character frequency effects reported in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Japanese Homomorphic Words

A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Japanese Homomorphic Words

Comparison and analysis of two methods for improving the accuracy of OpenNMT in literary and vernacular Chinese translation

As machine translation advances, challenges persist in achieving high accuracy when translating between Literary and Vernacular Chinese. Literary Chinese is known for its concise writing style, often characterized by monosyllabic words. In contrast, Vernacular Chinese incorporates more polysyllabic words. This study utilizes the OpenNMT system to address these challenges and employs different Classical Chinese word segmentation tools to train 2-layer Long Short-Term Memory and Transformer models. These models are then compared and analyzed to measure the improvement in precision. The research findings reveal that adopting a character-level-based word segmentation method for Classical Chinese, coupled with training the Transformer model using OpenNMT, significantly enhances precision. This outcome validates the current observation that existing Classical Chinese word segmentation methods lack sufficient accuracy, consequently impacting the quality of translations between Literary and Vernacular Chinese. By exploring and investigating these approaches, this study contributes to advancing machine translation techniques for improving accuracy in rendering Literary and Vernacular Chinese translations.

A genome-wide association study of Chinese and English language phenotypes in Hong Kong Chinese children

Dyslexia and developmental language disorders are important learning difficulties. However, their genetic basis remains poorly understood, and most genetic studies were performed on Europeans. There is a lack of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on literacy phenotypes of Chinese as a native language and English as a second language (ESL) in a Chinese population. In this study, we conducted GWAS on 34 reading/language-related phenotypes in Hong Kong Chinese bilingual children (including both twins and singletons; total N = 1046). We performed association tests at the single-variant, gene, and pathway levels. In addition, we tested genetic overlap of these phenotypes with other neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as cognitive performance (CP) and educational attainment (EA) using polygenic risk score (PRS) analysis. Totally 5 independent loci (LD-clumped at r2 = 0.01; MAF > 0.05) reached genome-wide significance (p < 5e-08; filtered by imputation quality metric Rsq>0.3 and having at least 2 correlated SNPs (r2 > 0.5) with p < 1e-3). The loci were associated with a range of language/literacy traits such as Chinese vocabulary, character and word reading, and rapid digit naming, as well as English lexical decision. Several SNPs from these loci mapped to genes that were reported to be associated with EA and other neuropsychiatric phenotypes, such as MANEA and PLXNC1. In PRS analysis, EA and CP showed the most consistent and significant polygenic overlap with a variety of language traits, especially English literacy skills. To summarize, this study revealed the genetic basis of Chinese and English abilities in a group of Chinese bilingual children. Further studies are warranted to replicate the findings.

Contribution of statistical learning in learning to read across languages.

Statistical Learning (SL) refers to human's ability to detect regularities from environment Kirkham, N. Z. (2002) & Saffran, J. R. (1996). There has been a growing interest in understanding how sensitivity to statistical regularities influences learning to read. The current study systematically examined whether and how non-linguistic SL, Chinese SL, and English SL contribute to Chinese and English word reading among native Chinese-speaking 4th, 6th and 8th graders who learn English as a second language (L2). Children showed above-chance learning across all SL tasks and across all grades. In addition, developmental improvements were shown across at least two of the three grade ranges on all SL tasks. In terms of the contribution of SL to reading, non-linguistic auditory SL (ASL), English visual SL (VSL), and Chinese ASL accounted for a significant amount of variance in English L2 word reading. Non-linguistic ASL, Chinese VSL, English VSL, and English ASL accounted for a significant amount of variance in Chinese word reading. Our results provide clear and novel evidence for cross-linguistic contribution from Chinese SL to English reading, and from English SL to Chinese reading, highlighting a bi-directional relationship between SL in one language and reading in another language.

A corpus-based study on the English-Chinese swearwords produced by amateur (fansubbing) and professional (prosubbing) subtitling

ABSTRACT The translation of culturally-sensitive elements, especially swearwords, poses a unique challenge for audiovisual (AV) products which are increasingly disseminated online to millions ofdiverse audiences. This study focuses on the convergence and divergence in the translation of swearwords by fan-produced and professional subtitles. Fansubbing, a fusion of ‘fan’ and ‘subtitling’, has gained prominence as volunteers translate foreign AV content into their domestic markets mainly due to the technological advances. Adopting a corpus-based approach, this study analyses translation patterns from a self-built corpus of 549,349 words from the original English scripts aligned with 528,889 professionally and 543,522 non-professionally translated Chinese words from a diverse sample of 57 recent English films. Ourresults predominantly reveal convergent practices, however, fansubbing appeared to adopt a more vulgarising approach when rendering swearwords (55%) than prosubbing (46%). No significant change or difference isobserved in terms of the frequency of strategy use over time and the frequency of retained semantics and pragmaticsbetween the two practices. Our findings help todisentangle the complex task of translating swearwords in audiovisual content, contributing novel and valuable empirical evidence.

An Analysis of the Translation of Chinese Culture-loaded Words in Fortress Besieged from the Perspective of Reception Aesthetics

Culture-loaded words are phrases and idioms that reflect unique national cultural characteristics and can directly reflect the historical uniqueness of a country. This paper discusses the translation of culture-loaded words in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of reception aesthetics, and analyzes the translator’s translation methods according to the similarities and differences between the source language culture and the target language culture. It also analyzes the feasibility of the translation of culture-loaded words under the guidance of reception aesthetics and the quality of the translation under the guidance of the two main theories of reception aesthetics (reader’s horizon of expectation and the implied reader). The main findings of this study are as follows: Firstly, translators adopt some translation methods and selectively meet readers’ directional and creative expectations. For different cultural transplanting phenomena, translators adopt different translation strategies to cater to readers’ receptivity and needs. Secondly, the implied reader plays an intermediary role in literature, connecting the creator and the audience, so that the work can be interpreted and experienced in a variety of contexts.

Application of the transformer model algorithm in chinese word sense disambiguation: a case study in chinese language

This study aims to explore the research methodology of applying the Transformer model algorithm to Chinese word sense disambiguation, seeking to resolve word sense ambiguity in the Chinese language. The study introduces deep learning and designs a Chinese word sense disambiguation model based on the fusion of the Transformer with the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) algorithm. By utilizing the self-attention mechanism of Transformer and the sequence modeling capability of BiLSTM, this model efficiently captures semantic information and context relationships in Chinese sentences, leading to accurate word sense disambiguation. The model’s evaluation is conducted using the PKU Paraphrase Bank, a Chinese text paraphrase dataset. The results demonstrate that the model achieves a precision rate of 83.71% in Chinese word sense disambiguation, significantly outperforming the Long Short-Term Memory algorithm. Additionally, the root mean squared error of this algorithm is less than 17, with a loss function value remaining around 0.14. Thus, this study validates that the constructed Transformer-fused BiLSTM-based Chinese word sense disambiguation model algorithm exhibits both high accuracy and robustness in identifying word senses in the Chinese language. The findings of this study provide valuable insights for advancing the intelligent development of word senses in Chinese language applications.

Age-related Chinese word recognition across different AoA and parts of speech

Age-related Chinese word recognition across different AoA and parts of speech

A preliminary study of multidimensional semantic evaluation of outdoor thermal comfort in Chinese

Traditional method to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort which used indicators (UTCI, PET, SET, etc.) has its limitations. Firstly, emotional factors are not included in the assessment, and secondly, the results lead to less accessibility, and it is difficult for non-experts to understand.Due to the above reasons, some scholars have investigated how to evaluate outdoor thermal comfort by ‘English vocabulary’, and there is still a gap in exploring the multidimensional semantic assessment of outdoor thermal comfort by using ‘Chinese vocabulary’. This paper established a ‘Chinese vocabulary’ thesaurus for outdoor thermal comfort evaluation through online and on-site questionnaire survey including 63 words, and an outdoor experiment was carried out to validate the effectiveness of the thesaurus. The results showed a significant correlation between the 2-phases results, revealing the effectiveness of the multidimensional semantic Chinese thesaurus. PET value has a wide range when Thermal Comfort Vote (TCV) are the same, and the words people used to describe the thermal environment in 5 dimensions are very different. The results showed that it is necessary to evaluate the thermal environment by the way of multidimensional semantic, which could make up the short comings of the traditional way (thermal comfort indicators).The field validation experiment of this study was only carried out for 3 days in spring in Shenyang city, thus the result was highly influenced by the experiment conditions and has its limitations. This study could be a fundamental exploration of thermal comfort evaluation by semantic way in Chinese words.

First Language Lexical Attrition in a First Language Setting: A Multi-Measure Approach Testing Teachers of English

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs. Chinese teachers of other subjects (N = 25/group) were recruited at a secondary school in China. The aim was to provide an exploratory basis of the L2 influence on L1 lexical attrition in the L1 environment, both on the level of lexical comprehension and production. Mixed-effects models were used to analyse multiple measures including response accuracy and reaction times in comprehension, and lexical diversity, density, sophistication, and accuracy in production. The results showed Chinese teachers’ L1 lexical attrition in the form of longer response times to high-frequency Chinese words compared to non-English Chinese teachers, and the use of significantly fewer sophisticated words in their retellings. Also, teachers of English were faster and more accurate in decisions about Chinese borrowings from English, suggesting L2-driven influence on their mental lexicon. Considering participants’ background information, analyses showed that increased L2 exposure and frequency of use can predict L1 lexical attrition.

Is “Taiwan” a psychoanalytic creation?

ABSTRACT The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but “peacefully” replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political “miracle.” My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana.

The effect of attention shifting on Chinese children's word reading in primary school.

This study explored the effects of attention shifting on Chinese children's word reading. The sample consisted of 87 fourth-grade children from Shaoxing City, China. The students completed measures of the attention shifting task, reading accuracy test, reading fluency test, and rapid automatized naming test. The results showed that reading fluency was significantly correlated with attention shifting scores, specifically with tag1 and tag6 (ps < 0.05). The reading accuracy score was also significantly correlated with tag6 (p < 0.05). According to the regression analysis of attention shifting on word reading, even when controlling for rapid automatic naming, attention shifting significantly affected word reading fluency at approximately 600ms (p = .011). Attention shifting did not affect children's word reading accuracy. These findings suggest that attention shifting is significantly associated with children's word reading. Educators should focus on developing children's attention shifting to improve their word reading ability.

Affective norms for 501 Chinese words from three emotional dimensions rated by depressive disorder patients.

Emotional words are often used as stimulus material to explore the cognitive and emotional characteristics of individuals with depressive disorder, while normal individuals mostly rate the scores of affective words. Given that individuals with depressive disorder exhibit a negative cognitive bias, it is possible that their depressive state could influence the ratings of affective words. To enhance the validity of the stimulus material, we specifically recruited patients with depression to provide these ratings. This study provided subjective ratings for 501 Chinese affective norms, incorporating 167 negative words selected from depressive disorder patients' Sino Weibo blogs, and 167 neutral words and 167 positive words selected from the Chinese Affective Word System. The norms are based on the assessments made by 91 patients with depressive disorder and 92 normal individuals, by using the paper-and-pencil quiz on a 9-point scale. Regardless of the group, the results show high reliability and validity. We identified group differences in three dimensions: valence, arousal, and self-relevance: the depression group rated negative words higher, but positive and neutral words lower than the normal control group. The emotional perception affected the individual's perception of words, to some extent, this database expanded the ratings and provided a reference for exploring norms for individuals with different emotional states.

The influence of induced moods on aging of phonological encoding in spoken word production: an ERP study.

This study investigated the influence of induced mood on the phonological encoding involved in Chinese spoken word production with a picture-word inference task while concurrently recorded electrophysiological signals. In the experiment, young and older participants watched videos for inducing positive, negative, or neutral mood, and then they were instructed to name target picture while ignoring phonologically related or unrelated distractor words. A phonological facilitation effect was observed in young adults but not in older adults, suggesting an age-related decline of phonological encoding. Both groups showed an inhibition effect in negative mood but not in positive mood, suggesting that speakers have different processing styles in different moods. ERP data revealed a phonological effect around the time window of 250-350 ms in both groups. Meanwhile, young adults showed a phonological effect around 350-450 ms in negative mood and positive mood which may reflect self-monitoring in speech production. We suggest that the former effect may reflect phonological encoding while the latter reflects self-monitoring of internal syllables or phonemes. Furthermore, induced moods influence the phonological effect in older and young adults differently. Behavioral and ERP results provide consistent evidence for the aging decline of phonological encoding in spoken word production.

Words of Chinese Origin in the OED: Misinformation and Attestation

Abstract Recent decades have seen small batches of Chinese loanwords and words from Chinese English entering the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Meanwhile, a muddle of misinformation on the dictionary’s inclusion of certain Chinese-origin words has occurred again and again in various Chinese media forms. The present study examines the extent to which these uninformed news stories are associated with prominent features of the OED. In order to assess the possibility of including the words mentioned in the pieces of misinformation, the study explores the current treatment of Chinese-origin words in the OED and adopts Diamond’s (2016) four criteria for entry, namely evidence of usage, longevity, naturalization, and lexicographical significance. Although the words examined are inadequate in meeting all criteria for inclusion, the misinformed new stories attest to an awareness of Chinese influence on the English lexicon and evidence the reception and reputation of the OED in Chinese media and culture. Moreover, the bits of false news reports expose lexicographers to new knowledge of some prospective candidates for lexicographical inclusion.