By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgment task, Study 1 found that Mandarin speakers ...

Prosodic marking of focus has been found to be typologically different in terms of existence of post-focus compression in F0 and intensity (PFC). In the current production experiments, we found that PFC showed in Mandarin, but not in Tsat (a language spoken in Hainan, China) or in Tsat-Mandarin (Mandarin spoken by Tsat people). The perception experiments further showed that focus perception in ...

Binaural hearing involves using information relating to the differences between the signals that arrive at the two ears, and it can make it easier to detect and recognize signals in a noisy environment. This phenomenon of binaural hearing is quantified in laboratory studies as the binaural masking-level difference (BMLD). Mandarin is one of the most commonly used languages, but there are no pub...

Systematic correspondences can be found between Cantonese and Mandarin tones. For example, most of the words pronounced with tone 2 in Cantonese are pronounced with tone 3 in Mandarin (e.g., 找 ‘find’). Therefore, Cantonese speakers may mistakenly think that words where the Mandarin tone pronunciation does not follow the dominant pronunciation relationship (e.g., 摸 ‘touch’, pronounced with Canto...

This paper aims at effectively identifying common English mispronunciations by Mandarin speakers and incorporating this knowledge into computer assisted language learning (CALL) to improve the learner’s accented English. For this purpose, English and Mandarin multi-channel EMA articulatory datasets collected from native English and native Mandarin speakers respectively have been used to uncover...

Intelligibility assessment is one of the important aspects in the text-to-speech system (TTS) evaluation. Several intelligibility assessment methods have been proposed and successfully applied to European languages, both at word level and sentence level. Since Mandarin has its own unique features, these methods must be modified when applying to Mandarin. The word level assessment methods such a...

English vowel productions were acoustically examined in a group of native Mandarin speakers. The first and second formant frequencies (F1 & F2) of 11 English vowels were examined in the syllable-level productions of 40 Mandarin speakers compared to 40 American English speakers. Results of the comparative acoustic analysis indicated that the Mandarin speakers differed significantly from the Amer...

There has been a hot debate on the typological status of Mandarin Chinese in Talmyan framework of Verb-framed languages (V-languages) and Satellite-framed Languages(S-languages). However, most previous studies focus on motion events, while other macro-events (Talmy, 2000) receive little attention. The present study aims to investigate event of realization in Mandarin Chinese with experimental m...