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 ...

clementine mandarin (citrus clementina) is one of the suitable/marketable citrus species in north of iran; however, as a disadvantage has small fruits. in order to produce new citrus cultivar with large and good quality fruit, a project with four phases was conducted from 1989 until 2009. the first phase was started with controlled cross pollination between clementine mandarin as maternal, and ...

This study investigated the role of creaky voice in the perception of Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3 among native English and native Mandarin listeners. Results showed that the presence of creaky voice affected the perception of Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3. Both native and nonnative listeners reported hearing these two tones at a later F0 turning point with the presence of creaky voice.

To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the...

Is Mandarin Chinese a syllable-timed language? Based on auditory impression, traditional analyses say it is. However, this question has rarely been investigated from the perspective of acoustic phonetics. Following Ramus et al. (1999) and Grabe and Low (2002), we measured the four rhythmic correlates: vowel percentage, consonant standard deviation, rPVI and nPVI in passage readings and conversa...