The linguistic content of the masker is important for the benefit of masking release in understanding noise-corrupted speech. The present work investigated how Mandarin sentence recognition is influenced by background noise with different linguistic content via two studies, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Mandarin sentences were corrupted by Mandarin-, Cantonese-, and En...

This paper introduces an experimental study of Mandarin tonal sequences produced by native English speakers. Sound recordings of learners’ Mandarin have been analyzed empirically and acoustically. The conclusions are as follows: tonal variation in accented Mandarin is not correlated to the original Mandarin tones or the context of the original Mandarin tons. The pronounced Mandarin tones select...

Post-focus compression (PFC), the lowering of pitch range and intensity of the post prosodic focus components, is a phenomenon that has been found in various languages worldwide. The interesting findings of the presence and absence of PFC in two closely-related Mandarin Chinese languages, Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin respectively, have brought several discussions on the historical origi...

The Urumqi Mandarin dialect has three tones, whereas Standard (Beijing) Mandarin has four tones. Recently, younger speakers in Urumqi began to use Standard Mandarin in daily conversation. We investigate how they acquire the tones in Standard Mandarin, especially the rising tone (T2) which lacks a counterpart in Urumqi Mandarin. We will show that these younger speakers initially use Urumqi tones...

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan „annoy; be annoyed; bother to do‟, which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are s...

This study investigated the spectral distributions of Mandarin retroflexion produced by Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin speakers. Results showed that Taiwan Mandarin speakers‟ retroflex production had a higher spectral mean than their Beijing Mandarin counterparts, yet the two groups‟ distributions overlapped to a certain degree. This indicates that retroflexion is gradient and that retrof...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

This study investigated the categorization of Mandarin lexical tones and music melodic tones by listeners differing in linguistic and musical experience (English musicians, English non-musicians, and Mandarin non-musicians). Linguistic tonal continua were created from the Mandarin rising to level, and falling to level tones. Melodic continua were created by varying the note D under the context ...

In Mandarin Chinese, there exist three pairs of voiceless alveolar and retroflex sibilants. Literature on Mandarin phonology generally prescribes a distinctive place contrast made in Beijing Mandarin, whereas a neutralization of the two categories is suggested for Taiwan Mandarin. However, some acoustic studies (e.g., Jeng 2006; Li 2009) have recently started to contend that retroflex neutraliz...