This study tested the hypothesis that heritage speakers of a minority language, due to their childhood experience with two languages, would outperform late learners in producing contrast: language-internal phonological contrast, as well as cross-linguistic phonetic contrast between similar, yet acoustically distinct, categories of different languages. To this end, production of Mandarin and Eng...

This study investigated the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility. Mandarin sentences were edited using a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve various amounts of segmental information and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. The vowel-only Mandarin sentences yielded a remarkable 3:1 intelligibility advantage over the consonant-on...

In this paper, we introduce a POS tagging method for Taiwan Southern Min. We use the more than 62,000 entries of the Taiwanese-Mandarin dictionary and 10 million words of Mandarin training data to tag Taiwanese. The literary written Taiwanese corpora have both Romanized script and Han-Romanization mixed script, and include prose, novels, and dramas. We follow the tagset drawn up by CKIP. We dev...

In this paper, we propose a POS tagging method using more than 60 thousand entries of Taiwanese-Mandarin translation dictionary and 10 million words of Mandarin training data to tag Taiwanese. The literary written Taiwanese corpora have both Romanization script and Han-Romanization mixed script, the genre includes prose, fiction and drama. We follow tagset drawn up by CKIP. We develop word alig...

This paper describes NTTS participation in the Blizzard Challenge 2008. The Blizzard Challenge 2008 extended the evaluation languages to Mandarin. In this year, the basic NTTS system was updated with a new Mandarin phrase prediction module. According to the listening evaluation results, all three aspects of English voice, similarity, MOS and word error rate, have been improved slightly. However...

This study focuses on the prosodic patterns of noun phrases (NP) in English, Mandarin and L2 English so as to find out the prosodic similarities and differences between English and Mandarin as well as the effects of the prosody of L1 Mandarin on the acquisition of L2 English NP prosody. The results reveal that English NPs usually have one IP for the NPs with pre-modifiers and two IPs for those ...

Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently? Boroditsky (2001) claimed they do, but the claim did not stand in three failed replications (Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008). Recently she and her colleagues reported data from a different task to support the claim (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2010). We repeated their study with English speakers in US,...

Previous work [1]–[5] has provided evidence that the perception of lexical tones by native speakers of Mandarin can be more categorical than that of naïve foreign listeners, for the tone pairings T1-T2, T2-T4, T1-T4 and T3-T4. The present study extended this work by testing Mandarin and naïve English listeners’ perception of all six possible pairwise combinations of the four Mandarin tones, usi...

This study investigated hemispheric lateralization of Mandarin tone. Four groups of listeners were examined: native Mandarin listeners, English–Mandarin bilinguals, Norwegian listeners with experience with Norwegian tone, and American listeners with no tone experience. Tone pairs were dichotically presented and listeners identified which tone they heard in each ear. For the Mandarin listeners, ...

This study examined the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. In the latter group, it also examined the role of the language environment and English proficiency. Three groups of listeners were tested: native English listeners (NE), Mandarin-speaking Chinese listeners in the US (M-US) and Mandarin listeners in Beijing, Ch...