Previous studies on Mandarin tone production indicate that there is no agreement on which tones are most difficult for L2 learners. Much of previous research on L2 learning of Mandarin tones has focused on monosyllables. In modern Mandarin, however, it is disyllabic words that dominate the vocabulary. This research investigates the production of Mandarin disyllabic tones by Japanese learners. I...

This paper reports on the continued activities towards the development of a computer-aided language learning system for German learners of Mandarin. In this experiment we used a complex corpus which consists of whole sentences and read from German students from three different years of language education and native speakers of Mandarin. A contrastive analysis of prosodic features (rhythmic and ...

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing Eng...

In this paper, we explore the use of attention-based models for online speech recognition without the usage of language models or searching. Our model is based on an attention-based neural network which directly emits English/Mandarin characters as outputs. The model jointly learns the pronunciation, acoustic and language model. We evaluate the model for online speech recognition on English and...

In light of the studies that investigate when and how English-speaking young children exhibit adult-like abstraction of syntax, this study explores these issues by examining Mandarin-speaking preschoolers ranging from 2to 5-year-olds’ comprehension of the Mandarin SVO-, ba-, long-passive, and short-passive constructions using the forced-choice pointing paradigm. The results indicated that at th...

Noisy listening conditions remain challenging for most cochlear implant patients. The present study simulated the effects of decay rates of excitation spread in cochlear implants on the intelligibility of Mandarin speech in noise. Mandarin sentence and tone stimuli were processed by noise-vocoder, and presented to normal-hearing listeners for identification. The decay rates of excitation spread...

This is a preliminary study examining the tonal production of L1 Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) speakers who are also fluent in Mandarin. Both languages have tone sandhi rules in which certain lexical tones are neutralized in non-XP-final positions. Disyllabic Mandarin and TSM words with different tonal combinations in frame sentences were examined. The results suggest that Mandarin Tone 1, Tone ...

This study investigated the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. The word-final voicing contrast was considered (as in minimal pairs such as `cub' and `cup') in a forced-choice word identification task. For these particular talkers and listeners, there was evidence of an interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for ...