Perception of gesturally different Mandarin retroflexes by Taiwan Mandarin speakers

This paper reports results from a study investigating whether there is a perceptual difference between gesturally different Mandarin retroflexes. Previous studies have suggested that there are two articulatory manners for Mandarin retroflexes: One involves the tongue tip being “curled-up,” and the other the tongue body being “bunched-up.” Thus, by implementing a perception test on Taiwan Mandarin listeners and an acoustic analysis, the research determines whether retroflexes produced with these gestures will be perceived differently. The resultsdings then show that “curled-up” and “bunched-up” retroflexes are not perceptually contrastive at a phonological level. However, the latter are perceived to be phonetically more retroflexed, with such property of stronger retroflexion reflected in their lower M1 (first moment) values. These findings yield one pedagogical implication. The teaching of retroflex articulations can be made reference to the gesture with which Mandarin learners can produce with more ease.

Articulatory Evidence for the Syllable-final Nasal Merging in Taiwan Mandarin

Syllable-final nasals /n/ and /ŋ/ in Taiwan Mandarin have been reported to be undergoing merging. Perceptual studies have reported that the alleged merging is context-sensitive and the merging directions are vowel-dependent. These findings have been mostly attributed to dialectal and social factors. The current study uses ultrasonography to capture postures of the entire tongue during the production of syllable-final nasals. The results, though confirming previous findings that the merging directions of syllable-final nasals are vowel-dependent, are best accounted for by the biomechanics of the tongue, as supported by computational 3D model simulations. Furthermore, for some speakers, although nasals were merged in terms of tongue posture, the degrees of nasalization of the preceding vowel were contrastive, suggesting that the merging process may be incomplete.

Geographical variation of the merging between dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin

This study investigates the geographical distribution of pronunciation variation of voiceless dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin. Previous studies indicated that the merging of the two sibilants is geographically dependent (Line, 1983; Chuang, 2009). However, the geographical effects in these studies are not easy to interpret due to the limited number of speakers and regions. For the current study, we recruited 331 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin from 120 regions in Taiwan. In a picture-naming task, 30 dental/retroflex-initial words were elicited from each speaker. The data were analysed with Generalized Additive Mixed models (Wood, 2004). The analysis revealed a robust effect of geographical location, with merging being less common in metropolitan cities as compared to the surrounding areas.

Testing the applicability of third tone sandhi at the intonation boundary

The purpose of this study is to test the applicability of Tone Three Sandhi (T3S) when the critical syllable is a monosyllabic topic preceding a topic boundary. A recitation task from 37 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin was employed. The results from human judgements indicated that the participants predominantly produced the critical syllables with Tone 3 (T3). Additionally, the fundamental frequency of the critical syllables demonstrated a falling contour, showing that T3S was not applied. Intonation break-ups and the prolongation of the critical syllables lent strong support to the view that the topic syllable was at an intonation/phonological phrase-final position. The findings can be elegantly accommodated by constraint-based analyses, which propose that T3S must be avoided when two T3 syllables are separated by an intonation/phonological phrase boundary. Issues relating to pauses, speech rates and word frequency effects are also discussed.

Light verb variations and varieties of Mandarin Chinese: Comparable corpus driven approaches to grammatical variations

This article presents a classification and clustering based study to account for the differences among five Chinese light verbs (congshi, gao, jiayi, jinxing, and zuo) as well as their variations in Mainland China Mandarin (ML) and Taiwan Mandarin (TW). Based on 13 linguistic features, both competition and co-development of these light verbs are studied in terms of their distinct and shared collocates. The proposed method discovers significant new grammatical differences in addition to confirming previously reported ones. Most significant discoveries include selectional restrictions differentiating deverbal nominals and event nouns, and degrees of transitivity of VO compounds. We also find that most variations between Mainland China Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin are in fact differences in tendencies or preferences in contexts of usage of shared grammatical rules.

Analyzing phonetic data with generalized additive mixed models

This chapter provides a user's guide to analysing phonetic data with the Generalized Additive Model (GAM). We show how GAMs can be used to capture the different kinds of nonlinear effects and patterns that are ubiquitous in phonetic data. To illustrate how GAMs work, we present analyses of three datasets of Taiwan Mandarin, addressing nonlinearities in time series of experimental response times, in F0 contours, and in the geographic distribution of sociophonetic variation. By building models incrementally, we clarify the kinds of problem that arise at various stages of analysis, and show how these can be addressed within the GAM framework. In our analyses, we also show how variation between individual speakers can be accounted for.