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...

Citrus cultivar identification systems using cleaved amplified polymorphic site and single-nucleotide polymorphism markers have been developed for nursery trees flesh fruits, but time cost efficiency require improvement the inspection process. Here, we a new system InDel marker. Twelve markers, which revealed clear bi-allelic PCR fragment patterns, were selected from 185 markers. Their primer s...

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...

We describe preliminary work on the detection of word fragments in Mandarin conversational telephone speech. We extracted prosodic, voice quality, and lexical features, and trained Decision Tree and SVM classifiers. Previous research shows that glottalization features are instrumental in English fragment detection. However, we show that Mandarin fragments are quite different than English; 90% o...

This paper reports on the continued activities to develop a computer-aided phonetic learning system for German learners of Mandarin. In the current study we used a corpus which consists of disyllables and sentences that were produced by first-year German students and native speakers of Mandarin. Half of the German group had attended an additional phonetic seminar. The first experiment was a ton...

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a...