This study examined the role of the native language (L1) transfer in a non-native language (L2) acquisition of the there-insertion construction at the syntax-semantics interface. Specifically, the study investigated if Mandarin EFL learners would make overgeneralization errors in the situation where an L1 argument structure constitutes a superset of its L2 counterpart. Verbs of existence and ap...

Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty producing native-like English stress contrasts. Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most probl...

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...

This study aims to evaluate the accuracy of Indonesian Mandarin translation a web page from Embassy in Beijing. The Nababan quality evaluation methodology, which was used this study, divides product into three categories: accuracy, acceptability, and readability. has two objectives: 1) analyze level acceptability readability Beijing's website 2) describe Embassy's text, broken up 37 pieces data...

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...