In Mandarin, there is a special acoustic feature—tonal pitch range, which is relative to stress. In this paper, we present a novel concept—tonal range ratio (TRR), which is based on tonal pitch range, and make a study on the correlation between TRR and stress in Mandarin. And we developed a system to automatically detect stresses in words and sentences based on TRR in Mandarin. We obtained high...

Huanglongbing (HLB) is a highly destructive, fast-spreading disease of citrus, causing substantial economic losses to the citrus industry worldwide. Nutrient levels and their cellular distribution patterns in stems and leaves of grapefruit were analysed after graft-inoculation with lemon scions containing 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus' (Las), the heat-tolerant Asian type of the HLB bacteri...

Acoustic characteristics of American English sentence stress produced by native Mandarin speakers are reported. Fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the sentence-level stress produced by 40 Mandarin speakers were compared to those of 40 American English speakers. Results obtained from two methods of stress calculation indicated that Mandarin speakers of American En...

Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study...

Cochlear implant (CI) speech performance is typically evaluated using well-enunciated speech produced at a normal rate by a single talker. CI users often have greater difficulty with variations in speech production encountered in everyday listening. Within a single talker, speaking rate, amplitude, duration, and voice pitch information may be quite variable, depending on the production context....

While many research studies have described Cantonese-Mandarin contact and the languages’ mutual influence in Guangdong Province, few of them delve into the linguistic mechanism that triggers Cantonese’s material (e.g. words, pronunciations, and/or grammar) transfer to Mandarin. This paper will work to explain this mechanism in Van Coetsem’s (1988) framework of “Borrowing and Imposition”. The Ca...

The current study investigated the spectral distribution of vowel cues to Mandarin and English sentence intelligibility. Sentences were segmentally interrupted to preserve various amounts of vowel information. Interruption parameters ensured that similar durations of speech were presented across the two languages. The remaining vowel cues were then either high-pass or low-pass filtered. Results...

Do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Boroditsky, (2001) demonstrated that speakers of English and Mandarin think differently about time. This work has recently been brought into question (January & Kako, 2007; Chen, 2007). Here I present new evidence that again demonstrates a difference between English and Mandarin speakers’ construals of time. Both languages use horizontal and ve...

Two experiments were designed to investigate two issues: (a) acoustic correlates in the place of articulation in Mandarin syllable-final nasals, and (b) the contribution of acoustic cues to perceptual saliency for the alveolar-velar nasal contrast. In Experiment 1, an acoustic analysis identified phonetic features adopted by L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin in Taiwan to distinguish the [n]-[ ] pa...

This paper introduces the CASIA Mandarin corpus designed for Mandarin speech synthesis research. It has been carefully recorded by a professional female speaker under studio conditions. The corpus contains 5000 phonetic context balanced sentences with about 7 hours. The text transcription with word boundaries, POS tags and pronunciation are also involved. The final corpus has been delivered to ...