This study aims at exploring detailed acoustic characteristics of Mandarin sustained vowels based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Cross-sectional area functions of the vocal tract for Mandarin vowels were extracted from volumetric MRI images obtained from eight Chinese speakers (six-male and two-female subjects). Acoustic analysis was performed for the vowels recorded from each speaker. Th...

Although English pitch accent detection has been studied extensively, there relatively a few works explore Mandarin stress etection. Moreover, the comparison and analysis between Mandarin stress detection and English pitch accent detection have not een touched for such counterpart tasks. In this paper, we discuss Mandarin stress detection and compare it with English pitch accent etection. The c...

This study reports our initial results on whether the use of pitch for expressing emotions differs between Mandarin and English. The production experiment was conducted using five emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and neutral) by comparing both prosodic cues and phonation cues between Mandarin and English emotional speech. Results demonstrated that within each language, each vocal emot...

The paper reports on the benefits of a computer-aided phonetic learning system for German learners of Mandarin. In the current study seven German first-year students of Mandarin Chinese participated in a test run of the phonetic training software. The students took four training units of 30 minute each within a week where they practiced their pronunciation and vocabulary with the software. A te...

Perception and production of English cues to plosive voicing by native Mandarin speakers" (2013). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 429. Abstract The acquisition of non-native sounds is a prominent feature of second language acquisition. Mandarin does not permit the voiced plosives /b d g/ or plosives in the syllable coda position, both features of many English words. This disparity presents a...

Second language learning becomes increasingly difficult with age, but some adults learn more successfully than others. We examined whether inter-subject variability in the microstructure of white matter pathways, as measured by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), would predict native English speakers' outcomes in learning Mandarin Chinese. Twenty-one adults were scanned before participating in an i...

This study examined how native Japanese speakers, who were naïve to Mandarin, categorized Mandarin tones (in citation form) into their native pitch–accent categories. Results showed that Japanese listeners categorized the nonnative Mandarin tones into their native pitch accent categories, in ways that were consistent with the phonetic features of listeners’ native language. The findings support...

Interest in providing Mandarin foreign language at K-12 schools in the United States has grown steadily since the language was identified as critical to the U.S. finance and social security. However, the shortage of qualified Mandarin teachers is widely recognized as the key bottleneck to building capacity in Mandarin education. Drawing from research on teacher learning and teaching as well as ...

We explore the use of two spectral measures calculated in ERB space for differentiating between the frication noise of sibilants in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. The peak frequency (peakERB) of the spectral representation was used to capture differences in front cavity size and a diffuseness index (DI) was used to capture the bandwidth of the peak. In both [a] and a high vowel context, the peakE...

How the properties of a first language (Mandarin, Korean) influence the comprehension of sentences in a second language (English) was investigated in a series of self-paced reading time studies. Native Mandarinand Korean-speaking learners of English were compared with native English speakers on how they resolved a temporary ambiguity about the relationship between a verb and the noun following ...