This study investigates the effect of L2-English experience on the perception of the English tense-lax high vowel contrast. Experienced L1-Mandarin, inexperienced L1-Mandarin and L1-English listeners identified and discriminated synthetic heed-hid and who’d-hood continua varying in five steps of F1, F2, and F3 variations and seven steps of duration variations. The results show a strong reliance...

The present study examined the number-specific parental language input to Mandarin- and English-speaking preschool-aged children. Mandarin and English transcripts from the CHILDES database were examined for amount of numeric speech, specific types of numeric speech and syntactic frames in which numeric speech appeared. The results showed that Mandarin-speaking parents talked about number more f...

Most contemporary linguists adopt a sixover nine-tone system in Cantonese. This study confirmed the psychological validity of the sixtone system through Cantonese speakers’ knowledge of Mandarin tone pronunciations using a Mandarin pinyin transcription task. There are pronunciation relationships between Cantonese and Mandarin at the lexical level and previous studies have shown that Cantonese s...

This study looks at whether Taiwan Mandarin speakers were able to detect discourse boundary cues in Mandarin (Guoyu and Putonghua), English, and Japanese. Results showed that there was a distinct language effect. Mandarin boundaries were harder to detect than English and Japanese boundaries for these listeners. This is thought to be due to the different boundary cue compositions in the four lan...

This study investigates how native prosodic systems as well as L2 learning experience shape non-native tone production in terms of tone movement, a primary cue to tone identity. In an imitation task, the six Cantonese tones were produced by four speaker groups: native Mandarin speakers (tonal), native English speakers (non-tonal), native English speakers with Mandarin learning experience (L2 to...

This paper presents a new approach to tone modeling for continuous Mandarin speech recognition. Mandarin tones provide rich information for speech recognition. In this paper, we treat the tone as an attribute of the final vowel part of a Mandarin syllable. Separate distributions are estimated for cepstral coefficients and pitch features respectively, and the phonetic state tied-mixture techniqu...

It is well established that digit span in native Chinese speakers is atypically high. This is commonly attributed to a capacity for more rapid subvocal rehearsal for that group. We explored this hypothesis by testing a group of English-speaking native Mandarin speakers on digit span and word span in both Mandarin and English, together with a measure of speed of articulation for each. When compa...

This study investigated the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility. Mandarin sentences were edited using a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve various amounts of segmental information and presented to normalhearing listeners to recognize. The vowel-only Mandarin sentences yielded a remarkable 3:1 intelligibility advantage over the consonantonly...

The paper describes the design, collection, transcription and analysis of 200 hours of HKUST Mandarin Telephone Speech Corpus (HKUST/MTS) from over 2100 Mandarin speakers in mainland China under the DARPA EARS framework. The corpus includes speech data, transcriptions and speaker demographic information. The speech data include 1206 ten-minute natural Mandarin conversations between either stran...

This paper provides an OT account for the realization of informational focus in Mandarin Chinese. The analysis is based on the conclusion drawn in my dissertation (Li 2009) that informational focus in Mandarin is realized in-situ with prosodic prominence (sentential stress), but no part is in particular prosodically more prominent if the entire sentence is the focus or when the sentence-final e...