Mandarin Chinese does not allow consonant finals except /n/ and /ng/. This raises questions concerning how well Mandarin speakers learning German can produce a clear /l/ at syllable final positions. This study investigates 490 German speech tokens with embedded postvocalic /l/ produced by 12 Mandarin speakers from 3 different levels and 2 native German speakers. Acoustic analyses indicate that ...

In this paper, we investigate the relative perceptual importance of the temporal envelop (TE) and temporal fine structure (TFS) between tonal language and non-tonal language perception. The “auditory chimera” experiment is conducted on both American English and Mandarin Chinese with the same conditions. Our experimental results show that there is no significant perceptual difference of TE and T...

Recent research has found that there is an overlap in the processing of music and speech in certain aspects. This research focuses on the relationship between the pitch of tones in language and the melody of songs. We present an automatic music composition system based on the prosody rules of Mandarin and we hypothesize that songs generated with our proposed system can help non-native Mandarin ...

This paper describes a crosslinguistic disfluency perception experiment. We tested the recognizability of pause fillers and partial words in English, German and Mandarin. Subjects were speakers of English with no knowledge of Mandarin or German. We found that subjects could identify disfluent from fluent utterances at a level above chance. Pause fillers were easier to identify than partial word...

Based on the noise-replacement paradigm, recent studies showed that vowels carried more perceptional information for sentence intelligibility than consonants. Considering that vowels contain many important acoustic cues for speech perception, this study further assessed the effect of spectral degradation to the intelligibility of Mandarin vowel sentences. Mandarin sentences were processed to ge...

Difficulty communicating in noise is a common complaint for people with hearing loss. When communicating in noise, speakers increase the intensity level of their voice and alter the stress patterns of their speech not only to monitor their own voice but also to be heard by others. Speech that increases in intensity for the purpose of self-monitoring and being understood in noise is called Lomba...

Neutral tone (T0) is a special tone form in Mandarin that contains tonal and stress information. Compared with canonical tones, T0 has a much shorter duration and reduced pitch contour. Its tonal contour is determined by the preceding canonical tone. However, not much is known about the perception of tonal and stress information in T0. In the current study, we investigate (1) whether T0 can be ...

Whispering is commonly used when one needs to speak softly (for instance, in a library). Whispered speech mainly differs from neutral speech in that voicing, and thus its acoustic correlate F0, is absent. It is well known that in tonal languages such as Mandarin, tone identity is primarily conveyed by the F0 contour. Previous works also suggest that secondary correlates are both consistent and ...

Research on text-to-speech (TTS) conversion for Mandarin Chinese is a much younger enterprise than comparable research for English or other European languages. Nonetheless, impressive progress has been made over the last couple of decades, and Mandarin Chinese systems now exist which approach, or in some ways even surpass in quality available systems for English. This article has two goals. The...

Languages function as independent and distinct conventional systems, and so each language uses different words to label the same objects. This study investigated whether 2-year-old children recognize that speakers of their native language and speakers of a foreign language do not share the same knowledge. Two groups of children unfamiliar with Mandarin were tested: monolingual English-learning ...