Yike Yang | Hong Kong Shue Yan University (original) (raw)

Papers by Yike Yang

Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022, 2022

The interaction between segment and prosody has been receiving increasing attention. While speake... more The interaction between segment and prosody has been receiving increasing attention. While speakers of European languages are found to hyper-articulate their speech to maintain the distinction between the focused and unfocused portions, little is known about focus effects on vowels in Chinese languages. This study investigated the potential interaction between prosodic focus and vowels and tested whether the effects of focus function differently in Cantonese and Mandarin, two closely related Chinese languages. In a focus production experiment, the target vowels were analysed on the duration, formants and distances. The results showed that prosodic focus influenced the open vowel /a/ differently in Cantonese and Mandarin. Although focus increased the vowel duration in both languages, the on-focus vowels were lengthened to a greater extent in Cantonese. The effect of focus was minimal on the vowel formants, especially in Cantonese. For the Euclidean distances between the vowels under broad focus and those under the remaining focus types, no difference was found, but Cantonese and Mandarin diverged in the directions in which each focus type moved away from broad focus. These results suggest that, while speakers of both languages hyper-articulate on-focus vowels, there are more differences than similarities between the two languages.

Prosodic focus is generally realised by expanded pitch range, lengthened duration and increased i... more Prosodic focus is generally realised by expanded pitch range, lengthened duration and increased intensity on the focused components, while the postfocus components may be associated with a compressed pitch range and intensity, which is referred to as post-focus compression (PFC). However, controversy surrounds whether PFC exists cross-linguistically, and detailed studies on how focus influences duration and intensity are scarce. This study aims to contribute novel data to the prosodic typology literature by examining the effects of focus on duration and intensity in Chongming Chinese (CC). Twenty target words were embedded under different focus conditions, and the production data were submitted for linear-mixed effects models. Our results showed focus-induced change of duration and intensity (i.e., lengthened duration and a larger intensity range under focus) as well as PFC of duration and intensity range in CC.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

This study is the first to examine the effect of perceptual training on Mandarin tone sandhi prod... more This study is the first to examine the effect of perceptual training on Mandarin tone sandhi production by Cantonese speakers. Auditory and visual inputs of tone sandhi contrasts were included in a short-term laboratory training, and the training was followed by an identification test. Twenty-four native speakers of Cantonese participated in the study, which comprised the training session and a preand post-training recording session. There were 192 target stimuli of real words and wug words and 192 filler words in each recording session. Two native Mandarin-speaking linguists perceptually evaluated a total of 23040 syllables on a 101-point scale. The results show that Cantonese speakers may be able to improve their lexical word production in the context of T3+T1/T2/T4 by perceptual training or high familiarity of stimuli, whereas the application of Mandarin sandhi Tone 3 slightly improves within a short time. Besides, the participants consistently apply Mandarin half-third tone sand...

We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving wate... more We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving water in Chinese based on Hantology, a SUMO-based ontology of Chinese orthography. Our comprehensive investigation of the morphosemantic behaviours of these weather words in both Mandarin and Sinitic languages reveals that they are predicted by the directionality and momentum of their formation and movement. We studied events involving water in both liquid and solid forms: such as rain, snow, hail, fog, dew and frost. They share the radical 雨, which can be linked to two SUMO nodes according to Hantology. This ontological bifurcation can be shown to bring about not only the diversity of direction expressions referring to these words for water, but also the differences of semantic features and PoS between them in Archaic Chinese. Moreover, the momentum of different water forms is proposed to be the physical basis for the differences of PoS, semantic features and node linking.

This study explores the corresponding relationship of Chinese characters’ pronunciations between ... more This study explores the corresponding relationship of Chinese characters’ pronunciations between modern Mandarin Chinese and modern Korean at the subsyllabic level and investigates the applicability of such correspondence in learning and reading Korean as a second language (L2) by native (L1) Mandarin Chinese speakers. Correspondence between Korean and Mandarin Chinese initial consonants and that between Korean -V(C) structures and Chinese finals were calculated based on the 1,800 Chinese characters for educational purposes in South Korea. Our results demonstrated that Korean initial consonants had either consistent or inconsistent correspondence with their Mandarin Chinese counterparts. In addition, this study proved that pure comparisons of vowels between the two languages are not reliable. Instead, the comparison between Korean -V(C) structures and Chines finals could be more practical. Ninety percent of the high frequency Chinese characters in Korean can be inferred to correspon...

The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest, and evidence suggesting... more The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest, and evidence suggesting a connection between musical abilities and prosodic processing skills in language is growing. Acoustic fundamental frequency (F0), perceived as pitch, differentiates notes in music and word meaning in lexical tone languages. This study examines categorical perception of pitch stimuli among 14 English musicians and 15 English non-musicians, both groups having no exposure to tonal languages. The stimuli consist of continua of falling and rising F0 contours produced on high and low vowels with 9 different durations. The results revealed that musicians were more sensitive to variation in stimulus duration than nonmusicians were, and music experience enhanced the sharpness of category boundaries. Significant main effects of vowel quality and pitch directions as well as two-way interactions between vowel and pitch direction, vowel and duration, group and duration, and pitch direction and dura...

Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical worl... more Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical world? We explore this seeming infelicity to study the nature of linguistic conceptualization. We focus on variations and changes of the morphosemantic behaviors of weather words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages with an interdisciplinary approach to establish links between linguistic expressions and scientific facts. We propose that this use of directionality is the result of conventionalization of Chinese people’s inference from shared daily experience, and is well motivated in terms of a linguistic ontology that reflects a scientific account of natural phenomena. We further demonstrate that the semantically relevant orthography shared by Chinese speakers can be directly mapped to Hantology, a formal linguistic ontology based on Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In this mapping, the radical 雨 yǔ “rain,” derived from the ideograph of “rain” to represent atmospheric water, provid...

Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (... more Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (e.g., Francis et al., 2003; Halle et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2006). Vowel quality, stimulus duration, and language background also significantly contributed to categorical perception of tones among native and non-native listeners (Chen et al., 2017). In comparison to pitch production, it was found that a relative shorter duration is required to perceive than to produce pitch contours, with non-tonal listeners needing longer duration to detect a change in the pitch direction. Duration asserts a stronger effect on between- and within-category discrimination patterns among tonal listeners. Fewer studies investigated the effects of stimulus duration and vowel quality in trilingual non-native speakers with and without musical training. Our study examines categorical perception of resynthesized pitch stimuli by 13 trilingual Cantonese musicians and 13 Cantonese non-musicians. We manipulated tone...

Concerning the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs), studies on head-initial languages consisten... more Concerning the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs), studies on head-initial languages consistently reported a preference for subjectgapped RCs, but the issue of subject-object asymmetry is still a controversial one in research on the acquisition of RCs in head-final languages. Using written corpus data, this study investigated the second language production of RCs in Mandarin Chinese (Chinese) by Japanese-speaking and Thai-speaking learners with various proficiency levels. We first extracted the RCs produced by Japanese and Thai learners from the HKS Dynamic Composition Corpus, and coded head type and gap type for further analyses. The learners from the intermediate-level groups produced a significant number of error-free RCs, which suggests that the intermediate learners have already mastered Chinese RCs. Both Japanese and Thai learners exhibited a strong preference for the subject RCs, which is consistent with predictions that follow from the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy ...

Sino-Korean words have their etymological roots in Chinese characters. Previous studies showed th... more Sino-Korean words have their etymological roots in Chinese characters. Previous studies showed that the correspondent relation between Chinese and the Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters facilitates the reading of Sino-Korean words by Chinese learners of Korean as a second language (L2). This study quantifies such correspondence at the syllable level by calculating the degree of correspondence in Korean-Chinese syllables. The degree of correspondence between Korean and Chinese syllables was examined. Results show that among the 406 Chinese character families in Sino-Korean words, 22.7% have an average correspondent consistency lower than 0.5 and 33.3% are equal to or higher than 0.5 but lower than 1. Suggestions for teaching and learning Korean as an L2 are proposed.

This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency ... more This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters and how their perception is related to the ontological representation of characters. More specifically, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to compare the perception of native Chinese speakers of various dialects from different regions, including Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. We explore several factors that may potentially cause convergence or divergence of native speakers’ perception. Our results show that the performances of participants from various regions converge with each other. From this, we conclude that Chinese speakers of various dialects share an ontological representation of characters and have an agreement concerning which ontological relation is more closely related to basic concepts, which provides evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese orthography. We also prove that the crowdsourcing method is a powerful and...

Frontiers in Psychology

Purpose: This study is to investigate whether Cantonese-speaking musicians may show stronger CP t... more Purpose: This study is to investigate whether Cantonese-speaking musicians may show stronger CP than Cantonese-speaking non-musicians in perceiving pitch directions generated based on Mandarin tones. It also aims to examine whether musicians may be more effective in processing stimuli and more sensitive to subtle differences caused by vowel quality.Methods: Cantonese-speaking musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency generated based on Mandarin level, rising and falling tones on two vowels with nine duration values.Results: Cantonese-speaking musicians exhibited a stronger categorical perception (CP) of pitch contours than non-musicians based on the identification and discrimination tasks. Compared to non-musicians, musicians were also more sensitive to the change of stimulus duration and to the intrinsic F0 in pitch perception in pitch processing.Conclusion: The CP was strengt...

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challe... more Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to synergise the many concepts of kinesis that grew from Aristotle’s original ideas to account for the correlation between meteorological events and their linguistic encoding. It is observed that the two most salient key factors of weather events, i.e., mass of weather substances and speed of weather processes, are the two contributing components of kinetic energy. Leveraging the linguistic theory that kinesis underpins conceptualisation of verb classes, this paper successfully accounts for the selection of verbs for different meteorological events in all Sinitic languages in terms of both language variations and changes. Specifically, weather...

PLOS ONE

Purpose To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may ... more Purpose To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians’ sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing. Method English and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values. Results Non-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types. Conclusion The effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Interspeech 2018

This paper investigates the auditory and acoustical characteristics of whispery disguised voice, ... more This paper investigates the auditory and acoustical characteristics of whispery disguised voice, and compares the patterns with those of normal (non-disguised) voices. It also evaluates effects of whispery disguise on forensic voice comparison. Recordings of eleven male college students’ normal voices and whispery disguised voices were collected. All their normal and whisper speech was acoustically analyzed and compared. The parameters including average syllable duration, intensity, vowel formant frequencies, and long term average spectrum (LTAS) were measured and statistically analyzed. The effect of whispery voice disguise on speaker recognition by auditory perception and an automatic system were evaluated. Correlation and regression analyses were made on the parameters of whispery voice and normal voice. These simple regression models can be used for parameter compensation in forensic casework.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g... more Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g., Bent et al., 2010) and suprasegmentals (e.g., Wong and Diehl, 2003). Zhang and Chen (2016) reported that gender-specific F0 range may contribute significantly to Cantonese tone perception. However, a full understanding of how the population F0 distribution affects tone identification is missing. This study aims to bridge this gap by modelling tone distributions and testing how deviated distribution parameters affect tone identification by native and non-native speakers. Statistical modeling of a Cantonese speech corpus of 68 speakers showed that F0 values of three Cantonese tones follow skew-normal distributions with three parameters: location, shape, and scale. We proceeded to conduct two experiments with 28 Cantonese and 28 Mandarin listeners using both naturally produced tones by 34 Cantonese speakers and manipulated tones with F0 values generated from simulated distributions. A multinomial mixed effects model revealed significant main effects of location and shape parameters. Locally weighted scatterplot smoothing curves also differed dramatically between native and non-native listeners, indicating an effect from long-term F0 distribution representations on tonal identification. The results thus offer useful insights about how parametric representations of phonetic distributions is used in tone identification.Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g., Bent et al., 2010) and suprasegmentals (e.g., Wong and Diehl, 2003). Zhang and Chen (2016) reported that gender-specific F0 range may contribute significantly to Cantonese tone perception. However, a full understanding of how the population F0 distribution affects tone identification is missing. This study aims to bridge this gap by modelling tone distributions and testing how deviated distribution parameters affect tone identification by native and non-native speakers. Statistical modeling of a Cantonese speech corpus of 68 speakers showed that F0 values of three Cantonese tones follow skew-normal distributions with three parameters: location, shape, and scale. We proceeded to conduct two experiments with 28 Cantonese and 28 Mandarin listeners using both naturally produced tones by 34 Cantonese speakers and manipulated tones with F0 values generated from simulated distributions. A multinomial mixed effects...

Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022, 2022

The interaction between segment and prosody has been receiving increasing attention. While speake... more The interaction between segment and prosody has been receiving increasing attention. While speakers of European languages are found to hyper-articulate their speech to maintain the distinction between the focused and unfocused portions, little is known about focus effects on vowels in Chinese languages. This study investigated the potential interaction between prosodic focus and vowels and tested whether the effects of focus function differently in Cantonese and Mandarin, two closely related Chinese languages. In a focus production experiment, the target vowels were analysed on the duration, formants and distances. The results showed that prosodic focus influenced the open vowel /a/ differently in Cantonese and Mandarin. Although focus increased the vowel duration in both languages, the on-focus vowels were lengthened to a greater extent in Cantonese. The effect of focus was minimal on the vowel formants, especially in Cantonese. For the Euclidean distances between the vowels under broad focus and those under the remaining focus types, no difference was found, but Cantonese and Mandarin diverged in the directions in which each focus type moved away from broad focus. These results suggest that, while speakers of both languages hyper-articulate on-focus vowels, there are more differences than similarities between the two languages.

Prosodic focus is generally realised by expanded pitch range, lengthened duration and increased i... more Prosodic focus is generally realised by expanded pitch range, lengthened duration and increased intensity on the focused components, while the postfocus components may be associated with a compressed pitch range and intensity, which is referred to as post-focus compression (PFC). However, controversy surrounds whether PFC exists cross-linguistically, and detailed studies on how focus influences duration and intensity are scarce. This study aims to contribute novel data to the prosodic typology literature by examining the effects of focus on duration and intensity in Chongming Chinese (CC). Twenty target words were embedded under different focus conditions, and the production data were submitted for linear-mixed effects models. Our results showed focus-induced change of duration and intensity (i.e., lengthened duration and a larger intensity range under focus) as well as PFC of duration and intensity range in CC.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

This study is the first to examine the effect of perceptual training on Mandarin tone sandhi prod... more This study is the first to examine the effect of perceptual training on Mandarin tone sandhi production by Cantonese speakers. Auditory and visual inputs of tone sandhi contrasts were included in a short-term laboratory training, and the training was followed by an identification test. Twenty-four native speakers of Cantonese participated in the study, which comprised the training session and a preand post-training recording session. There were 192 target stimuli of real words and wug words and 192 filler words in each recording session. Two native Mandarin-speaking linguists perceptually evaluated a total of 23040 syllables on a 101-point scale. The results show that Cantonese speakers may be able to improve their lexical word production in the context of T3+T1/T2/T4 by perceptual training or high familiarity of stimuli, whereas the application of Mandarin sandhi Tone 3 slightly improves within a short time. Besides, the participants consistently apply Mandarin half-third tone sand...

We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving wate... more We present in this paper a study of the conceptualisation of meteorological events involving water in Chinese based on Hantology, a SUMO-based ontology of Chinese orthography. Our comprehensive investigation of the morphosemantic behaviours of these weather words in both Mandarin and Sinitic languages reveals that they are predicted by the directionality and momentum of their formation and movement. We studied events involving water in both liquid and solid forms: such as rain, snow, hail, fog, dew and frost. They share the radical 雨, which can be linked to two SUMO nodes according to Hantology. This ontological bifurcation can be shown to bring about not only the diversity of direction expressions referring to these words for water, but also the differences of semantic features and PoS between them in Archaic Chinese. Moreover, the momentum of different water forms is proposed to be the physical basis for the differences of PoS, semantic features and node linking.

This study explores the corresponding relationship of Chinese characters’ pronunciations between ... more This study explores the corresponding relationship of Chinese characters’ pronunciations between modern Mandarin Chinese and modern Korean at the subsyllabic level and investigates the applicability of such correspondence in learning and reading Korean as a second language (L2) by native (L1) Mandarin Chinese speakers. Correspondence between Korean and Mandarin Chinese initial consonants and that between Korean -V(C) structures and Chinese finals were calculated based on the 1,800 Chinese characters for educational purposes in South Korea. Our results demonstrated that Korean initial consonants had either consistent or inconsistent correspondence with their Mandarin Chinese counterparts. In addition, this study proved that pure comparisons of vowels between the two languages are not reliable. Instead, the comparison between Korean -V(C) structures and Chines finals could be more practical. Ninety percent of the high frequency Chinese characters in Korean can be inferred to correspon...

The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest, and evidence suggesting... more The link between music and language has been a subject of great interest, and evidence suggesting a connection between musical abilities and prosodic processing skills in language is growing. Acoustic fundamental frequency (F0), perceived as pitch, differentiates notes in music and word meaning in lexical tone languages. This study examines categorical perception of pitch stimuli among 14 English musicians and 15 English non-musicians, both groups having no exposure to tonal languages. The stimuli consist of continua of falling and rising F0 contours produced on high and low vowels with 9 different durations. The results revealed that musicians were more sensitive to variation in stimulus duration than nonmusicians were, and music experience enhanced the sharpness of category boundaries. Significant main effects of vowel quality and pitch directions as well as two-way interactions between vowel and pitch direction, vowel and duration, group and duration, and pitch direction and dura...

Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical worl... more Why are fog, dew, and frost said to “fall” in some languages when they don’t in the physical world? We explore this seeming infelicity to study the nature of linguistic conceptualization. We focus on variations and changes of the morphosemantic behaviors of weather words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages with an interdisciplinary approach to establish links between linguistic expressions and scientific facts. We propose that this use of directionality is the result of conventionalization of Chinese people’s inference from shared daily experience, and is well motivated in terms of a linguistic ontology that reflects a scientific account of natural phenomena. We further demonstrate that the semantically relevant orthography shared by Chinese speakers can be directly mapped to Hantology, a formal linguistic ontology based on Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO). In this mapping, the radical 雨 yǔ “rain,” derived from the ideograph of “rain” to represent atmospheric water, provid...

Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (... more Mandarin tones are perceived categorically by native listeners, but not by non-native listeners (e.g., Francis et al., 2003; Halle et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2006). Vowel quality, stimulus duration, and language background also significantly contributed to categorical perception of tones among native and non-native listeners (Chen et al., 2017). In comparison to pitch production, it was found that a relative shorter duration is required to perceive than to produce pitch contours, with non-tonal listeners needing longer duration to detect a change in the pitch direction. Duration asserts a stronger effect on between- and within-category discrimination patterns among tonal listeners. Fewer studies investigated the effects of stimulus duration and vowel quality in trilingual non-native speakers with and without musical training. Our study examines categorical perception of resynthesized pitch stimuli by 13 trilingual Cantonese musicians and 13 Cantonese non-musicians. We manipulated tone...

Concerning the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs), studies on head-initial languages consisten... more Concerning the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs), studies on head-initial languages consistently reported a preference for subjectgapped RCs, but the issue of subject-object asymmetry is still a controversial one in research on the acquisition of RCs in head-final languages. Using written corpus data, this study investigated the second language production of RCs in Mandarin Chinese (Chinese) by Japanese-speaking and Thai-speaking learners with various proficiency levels. We first extracted the RCs produced by Japanese and Thai learners from the HKS Dynamic Composition Corpus, and coded head type and gap type for further analyses. The learners from the intermediate-level groups produced a significant number of error-free RCs, which suggests that the intermediate learners have already mastered Chinese RCs. Both Japanese and Thai learners exhibited a strong preference for the subject RCs, which is consistent with predictions that follow from the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy ...

Sino-Korean words have their etymological roots in Chinese characters. Previous studies showed th... more Sino-Korean words have their etymological roots in Chinese characters. Previous studies showed that the correspondent relation between Chinese and the Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters facilitates the reading of Sino-Korean words by Chinese learners of Korean as a second language (L2). This study quantifies such correspondence at the syllable level by calculating the degree of correspondence in Korean-Chinese syllables. The degree of correspondence between Korean and Chinese syllables was examined. Results show that among the 406 Chinese character families in Sino-Korean words, 22.7% have an average correspondent consistency lower than 0.5 and 33.3% are equal to or higher than 0.5 but lower than 1. Suggestions for teaching and learning Korean as an L2 are proposed.

This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency ... more This study aims to investigate how native speakers of Chinese perceive the semantic transparency of radicals in Chinese characters and how their perception is related to the ontological representation of characters. More specifically, we use semantic transparency as a measurement to compare the perception of native Chinese speakers of various dialects from different regions, including Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan. We explore several factors that may potentially cause convergence or divergence of native speakers’ perception. Our results show that the performances of participants from various regions converge with each other. From this, we conclude that Chinese speakers of various dialects share an ontological representation of characters and have an agreement concerning which ontological relation is more closely related to basic concepts, which provides evidence for the psychological reality of Chinese orthography. We also prove that the crowdsourcing method is a powerful and...

Frontiers in Psychology

Purpose: This study is to investigate whether Cantonese-speaking musicians may show stronger CP t... more Purpose: This study is to investigate whether Cantonese-speaking musicians may show stronger CP than Cantonese-speaking non-musicians in perceiving pitch directions generated based on Mandarin tones. It also aims to examine whether musicians may be more effective in processing stimuli and more sensitive to subtle differences caused by vowel quality.Methods: Cantonese-speaking musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency generated based on Mandarin level, rising and falling tones on two vowels with nine duration values.Results: Cantonese-speaking musicians exhibited a stronger categorical perception (CP) of pitch contours than non-musicians based on the identification and discrimination tasks. Compared to non-musicians, musicians were also more sensitive to the change of stimulus duration and to the intrinsic F0 in pitch perception in pitch processing.Conclusion: The CP was strengt...

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challe... more Interactions among the environment, humans and language underlie many of the most pressing challenges we face today. This study investigates the use of different verbs to encode various weather events in Sinitic languages, a language family spoken over a wide range of climates and with 3000 years of continuous textual documentation. We propose to synergise the many concepts of kinesis that grew from Aristotle’s original ideas to account for the correlation between meteorological events and their linguistic encoding. It is observed that the two most salient key factors of weather events, i.e., mass of weather substances and speed of weather processes, are the two contributing components of kinetic energy. Leveraging the linguistic theory that kinesis underpins conceptualisation of verb classes, this paper successfully accounts for the selection of verbs for different meteorological events in all Sinitic languages in terms of both language variations and changes. Specifically, weather...

PLOS ONE

Purpose To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may ... more Purpose To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians’ sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing. Method English and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values. Results Non-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types. Conclusion The effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Interspeech 2018

This paper investigates the auditory and acoustical characteristics of whispery disguised voice, ... more This paper investigates the auditory and acoustical characteristics of whispery disguised voice, and compares the patterns with those of normal (non-disguised) voices. It also evaluates effects of whispery disguise on forensic voice comparison. Recordings of eleven male college students’ normal voices and whispery disguised voices were collected. All their normal and whisper speech was acoustically analyzed and compared. The parameters including average syllable duration, intensity, vowel formant frequencies, and long term average spectrum (LTAS) were measured and statistically analyzed. The effect of whispery voice disguise on speaker recognition by auditory perception and an automatic system were evaluated. Correlation and regression analyses were made on the parameters of whispery voice and normal voice. These simple regression models can be used for parameter compensation in forensic casework.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g... more Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g., Bent et al., 2010) and suprasegmentals (e.g., Wong and Diehl, 2003). Zhang and Chen (2016) reported that gender-specific F0 range may contribute significantly to Cantonese tone perception. However, a full understanding of how the population F0 distribution affects tone identification is missing. This study aims to bridge this gap by modelling tone distributions and testing how deviated distribution parameters affect tone identification by native and non-native speakers. Statistical modeling of a Cantonese speech corpus of 68 speakers showed that F0 values of three Cantonese tones follow skew-normal distributions with three parameters: location, shape, and scale. We proceeded to conduct two experiments with 28 Cantonese and 28 Mandarin listeners using both naturally produced tones by 34 Cantonese speakers and manipulated tones with F0 values generated from simulated distributions. A multinomial mixed effects model revealed significant main effects of location and shape parameters. Locally weighted scatterplot smoothing curves also differed dramatically between native and non-native listeners, indicating an effect from long-term F0 distribution representations on tonal identification. The results thus offer useful insights about how parametric representations of phonetic distributions is used in tone identification.Talker variability affects native and non-native speakers in speech perception of segmentals (e.g., Bent et al., 2010) and suprasegmentals (e.g., Wong and Diehl, 2003). Zhang and Chen (2016) reported that gender-specific F0 range may contribute significantly to Cantonese tone perception. However, a full understanding of how the population F0 distribution affects tone identification is missing. This study aims to bridge this gap by modelling tone distributions and testing how deviated distribution parameters affect tone identification by native and non-native speakers. Statistical modeling of a Cantonese speech corpus of 68 speakers showed that F0 values of three Cantonese tones follow skew-normal distributions with three parameters: location, shape, and scale. We proceeded to conduct two experiments with 28 Cantonese and 28 Mandarin listeners using both naturally produced tones by 34 Cantonese speakers and manipulated tones with F0 values generated from simulated distributions. A multinomial mixed effects...

Explorations of Chinese Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 2020

Based on the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), numerous studies have investigated the relationshi... more Based on the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), numerous studies have investigated the relationship between age of acquisition (AoA) and second language (L2) ultimate attainment. However, it is not yet clear when is the end of the critical period (CP) and how AoA affects L2 attainment. Different termini of CP have been identified in literature, and the realisation of AoA effects on L2 attainment is also under debate. This study critically reviewed the controversial issues concerning the CPH and analysed production data of Cantonese-speaking learners of Mandarin with piecewise regression modelling. The data were elicited production of Mandarin ba-sentences, which possess a pre-transitive construction with a unique syntactic structure and several semantic constraints. The data showed that regression models with various breakpoints were not better than a simple linear regression model, based on which we rejected the discontinuous decline hypothesis and provided evidence against the CPH. Also, our results indicated a tendency that with the increase of AoA, L2 ultimate attainment would become more divergent from target language grammar. A further comparison did not display qualitative differences in Cantonese learners' acquisition of two types of ba-construction. Moreover, the Cantonese learners acquired the ba-construction more successfully than learners with other language backgrounds, which might be attributed to the similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin.