The relationship between music and language processing was explored in two perception experiments on the identification of musical notes and Mandarin tones. In the music task, Mandarin-speaking musicians were asked to identify musical notes of three timbres without a reference pitch. 72% of the musicians met the criterion for absolute pitch when an exact match was required, and 82% met the crit...

Abstract: This study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking children can demonstrate adult-like syntactic competence. Mandarin-speaking 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of agent-patient relations across four Mandarin transitive constructions with the novel verbs: SVO construction, ba-construction, subjectless ba-construciton, and topicalization construction were examined using...

The study explored the perception and acoustic features of prosodic hierarchy boundaries in Uygur and Mandarin Chinese. The results of the perception study showed that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were more sensitive to prosodic hierarchy boundaries than native speakers of Uygur. The results of a detailed acoustic analysis indicated that the acoustic features of Uygur prosodic hierarchy ...

This study investigated how Min proficiency influenced the realization of Mandarin tones in Mandarin-Min bilinguals. Forty subjects recruited were divided into the high and the low Min proficiency groups. Isolated Mandarin syllables carrying one of the four Mandarin tones were recorded. Results showed that Min proficiency was roughly in negative correlation with pitch height for high tonal targ...

This paper presents a design of a Mandarin to Taiwanese Min Nan (abbreviated as Taiwanese hereafter) machine translation system. It is the first machine translation system which focuses on these two languages. An input Mandarin sentence is segmented, tagged and translated word by word according to the part of speech of each word. The candidates come from a Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary. If more...

Mandarin has four lexical tones and Hong Kong Cantonese has six lexical tones. The pitch pattern of T1 and T4 in Mandarin is high level and high falling. According to the results of previous research, the pitch boundary of T1 and T4 by native speakers of Mandarin is categorical. Using the synthesized disyllable real words as stimuli, this paper aims to examine the identification and discriminat...

This study provides an acoustic analysis of the monophthongs of Brunei Mandarin. Recordings were made of a short text by 20 Bruneian Chinese as well as 20 Beijing Chinese. Comparison of the scatter plots show that [i] and [y] are merged in Brunei Mandarin. This observation is quantified by calculating the Euclidean distance between the minimal pair nǐ [ni] and nǚ [ny] and the frequency of F3 of...

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...