Mandarin Chinese WH-questions exhibit two syntactically interesting characteristics. First, WH-words that bear interrogative information always occur in situ.Second, in spite the above fact, I find that Mandarin WH-questions, with bounded WH-words, share the grammatical behaviors common to questions with unbounded and dislocated WH-words in other languages.Hence,intuitively,an account of Mandar...

In this paper we shall describe Dragon Systems’ 1998 Broadcast News transcription system for Mandarin. We shall describe our music classifier, which was unique to our Mandarin system, as well as our speaker change detection algorithm, ̋ which was used in our English and Mandarin systems. We shall also report on preliminary, post-evaluation experiments with pitch.

Despite its prevalence as one of the most highly influential models of spoken word recognition, the TRACE model has yet to be extended to consider tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. A key reason for this is that the model in its current state does not encode lexical tone. In this report, we present a modified version of the jTRACE model in which we borrowed on its existing architecture t...

Previously post-focus compression (PFC) - the lowering of fundamental frequency (F0) and intensity of post-focal words to below those of the same words in identical sentences with neutral focus - was found in Beijing Mandarin but not in Taiwan Southern Min and Taiwan Mandarin. This study investigated whether the presence of PFC would vary with age and language use of societal bilinguals of Sout...

This study examines voice onset time (VOT) for phonetically voiceless word-initial stops in Mandarin Chinese and in English, as spoken by 11 Mandarin speakers and 4 British English speakers. The purpose of this paper is to compare Mandarin and English VOT patterns and to categorize their stop realizations along the VOT continuum. As expected, the findings reveal that voiceless aspirated stops i...

4. Rouse, A. H., C. D. Atkins and R. L. Huggart. 1954. Effect of pulp quantity on chemical and physi cal properties of citrus juices and concentrates. Food Technol. 8: 431-435. 5. U. S. Dept. Agriculture. U. S. standards for grades of canned citrus juices and concentrates. Agricultural Marketing Service, Washington, D. C: (a) Frozen concentrated grapefruit juice, Dec. 1951; (b) Frozen concentra...

One of the challenges in automatic speech recognition is foreign words recognition. It is observed that a speaker’s pronunciation of a foreign word is influenced by his native language knowledge, and such phenomenon is known as the effect of language transfer. This paper focuses on examining the phonetic effect of language transfer in automatic speech recognition. A set of lexical rules is prop...

FRICATIVES IN MANDARIN-MIN SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUALS ! Yu-Ying Chuang, Sheng-Fu Wang, & Janice Fon ! Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] !! ABSTRACT This study investigated cross-linguistic interaction in Mandarin-Min simultaneous bilinguals by examining how speech contexts and realizations of Min /z/, which ...

The relationship between music and language processing was explored in two perception experiments on the identification of musical notes and Mandarin tones. In the music task, Mandarin-speaking musicians were asked to identify musical notes of three timbres without a reference pitch. 72% of the musicians met the criterion for absolute pitch when an exact match was required, and 82% met the crit...

Abstract: This study investigated whether Mandarin-speaking children can demonstrate adult-like syntactic competence. Mandarin-speaking 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds’ and adults’ comprehension of agent-patient relations across four Mandarin transitive constructions with the novel verbs: SVO construction, ba-construction, subjectless ba-construciton, and topicalization construction were examined using...