The current paper discusses first investigations aimed to lay the groundwork for the development of computer-aided pronunciation training for teaching Mandarin to Germans. We conducted a contrastive analysis of the two languages leading to a set of tokens for a production and perception experiment involving German first-year students of Mandarin. Their data were perceptually evaluated by a teac...

PURPOSE English and Mandarin are the 2 most spoken languages in the world, yet it is not known how stuttering manifests in English-Mandarin bilinguals. In this research, the authors investigated whether the severity and type of stuttering is different in English and Mandarin in English-Mandarin bilinguals, and whether this difference was influenced by language dominance. METHOD Thirty English...

This study examined the role of the native language (L1) transfer in a non-native language (L2) acquisition of the there-insertion construction at the syntax-semantics interface. Specifically, the study investigated if Mandarin EFL learners would make overgeneralization errors in the situation where an L1 argument structure constitutes a superset of its L2 counterpart. Verbs of existence and ap...

Native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty producing native-like English stress contrasts. Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional, involving manipulation of fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity and vowel quality. Errors in any or all of these correlates could interfere with perception of the stress contrast, but it is unknown which correlates are most probl...

The linguistic content of the masker is important for the benefit of masking release in understanding noise-corrupted speech. The present work investigated how Mandarin sentence recognition is influenced by background noise with different linguistic content via two studies, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Mandarin sentences were corrupted by Mandarin-, Cantonese-, and En...

This paper introduces an experimental study of Mandarin tonal sequences produced by native English speakers. Sound recordings of learners’ Mandarin have been analyzed empirically and acoustically. The conclusions are as follows: tonal variation in accented Mandarin is not correlated to the original Mandarin tones or the context of the original Mandarin tons. The pronounced Mandarin tones select...

Post-focus compression (PFC), the lowering of pitch range and intensity of the post prosodic focus components, is a phenomenon that has been found in various languages worldwide. The interesting findings of the presence and absence of PFC in two closely-related Mandarin Chinese languages, Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin respectively, have brought several discussions on the historical origi...

The Urumqi Mandarin dialect has three tones, whereas Standard (Beijing) Mandarin has four tones. Recently, younger speakers in Urumqi began to use Standard Mandarin in daily conversation. We investigate how they acquire the tones in Standard Mandarin, especially the rising tone (T2) which lacks a counterpart in Urumqi Mandarin. We will show that these younger speakers initially use Urumqi tones...

This paper investigates the transitive uses of the verb fan „annoy; be annoyed; bother to do‟, which exhibit both similarities and disparities between Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin, as far as the data from Gigaword corpus, containing data from Mainland China (XIN) and Taiwan (CNA), are concerned. In terms of similarities, the causative (and agentive) use(s) of the transitive fan is/are s...

This study investigated the spectral distributions of Mandarin retroflexion produced by Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin speakers. Results showed that Taiwan Mandarin speakers‟ retroflex production had a higher spectral mean than their Beijing Mandarin counterparts, yet the two groups‟ distributions overlapped to a certain degree. This indicates that retroflexion is gradient and that retrof...