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The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal struct... more The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese lang...

Ohio State University. Libraries, May 1, 2021

Previous studies of linguistic areas have often adopted a mainly top-down approach, by first hypo... more Previous studies of linguistic areas have often adopted a mainly top-down approach, by first hypothesizing the existence of a linguistic area and then seeking the common linguistic features of that hypothetical area in order to justify its existence. In order to identify linguistic areas in East Asia in a different way, we adopt a mainly bottom-up approach by first investigating the values of the linguistic feature parameters of languages spoken in East Asia and then calculating those values to locate geographical clusters of languages sharing a certain degree of cross-family similarity. Based on 19 phonological features as binary parameters of 52 sample languages of East Asia, we visualize their within-family and cross-family similarities. Many of these similarities confirm the previous theories concerning linguistic areas, such as the Mainland Southeast Asia or the Qinghai-Gansu linguistic area. However, we also demonstrate some similarities that have received less attention thus far, namely between Ryukyuan and southern Sinitic languages.

The papers contained herein were, upon first submission, edited principally for style by members ... more The papers contained herein were, upon first submission, edited principally for style by members of the Executive Committee. These edited versions were incorporated by Herman Leung and Zachary O'Hagan into a draft manuscript that was circulated among authors either for their approval or for further editing. Following resubmission, final versions of papers were incorporated by Zachary O'Hagan into the monograph found here. Our goal has been the speedy publication of these proceedings, and as such, certain aspects-e.g., the complete unification of formatting-have been sacrificed. It is our belief that this does not detract from the final publication in any way.

Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing, 2021

With the recent rise in popularity of Transformer models in Natural Language Processing, research... more With the recent rise in popularity of Transformer models in Natural Language Processing, research efforts have been dedicated to the development of domain-adapted versions of BERT-like architectures. In this study, we focus on FinBERT, a Transformer model trained on text from the financial domain. By comparing its performances with the original BERT on a wide variety of financial text processing tasks, we found continual pretraining from the original model to be the more beneficial option. Domain-specific pretraining from scratch, conversely, seems to be less effective.

This study reports the results of two sets of corpus studies on the use of beneficiary structures... more This study reports the results of two sets of corpus studies on the use of beneficiary structures (wei-dong shi), one in modern and the other in ancient Chinese. First, we analyzed the semantic associations of the word weile ‘do something for something/someone’ in modern Chinese, using two corpora and the word-embedding model. The results were in line with semantic analyses proposed in the Semantic-Map Model. Second, based on an examination of all the sentences expressing beneficiary meanings in Zuo’s Commentary and Mencius, we established that the beneficiary structure in those works involves a light-verb structure that should be syntactically distinguished from other such structures that introduce causative and intentional events. As well as providing some new evidence regarding the semantic content of the wei-dong shi in modern Chinese, we present structural evidence of its source, which can be dated to the pre-Qin period, as shown by the examples in the two target ancient-Chines...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2020

This paper reports on two speech-production experiments focused on Putonghua and Taiwan Mandarin ... more This paper reports on two speech-production experiments focused on Putonghua and Taiwan Mandarin sentence-final particles and wh-phrases that have interrogative or indefinite readings in three contexts: yes/no questions, wh-questions, and statements. Sentence-final particles were found to influence focus-prosody through right-edge shortening and lowering of F0 and intensity of wh-phrases, thus distinguishing wh-interrogatives from indefinites and questions from statements. Speakers adopt multidimensional acoustic strategies to shape intonation: while maintaining the lexical tones, prosody interacts with the organization imposed by syntax, semantics, and focus. The two varieties of Mandarin differ in the extent to which their prosodic differences represent such syntactic-semantic information.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless lan... more The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless language, its nominal expressions involve structures larger than a Noun Phrase (NP). I argue that two distinct projections, Demonstrative Phrase (DemP) and Unit Phrase (UnitP), should be identified in the structure above NP. Second, based on the proposal, I show that various ambiguous expressions, in fact, involve different levels of nominal structures, and that they can be disambiguated under specific contexts. The data in this paper suggest that classifiers are better analyzed as the head of UnitP that dominates NP (and takes number phrase as its specifier), and that DemP dominates UnitP, structurally. I also argue that true possessors should be distinguished from possessive modifiers, and I show that their structural difference explains the restriction concerning phenomena of extractions. Based on data of the fixe ordering of demonstrative-classifier-noun, the distribution and the interp...

Prior studies on event knowledge in sentence comprehension have shown that the aspect of the main... more Prior studies on event knowledge in sentence comprehension have shown that the aspect of the main verb plays an important role in the processing of non-core semantic roles, such as locations: when the aspect of the main verb is imperfective, locations become more salient in the mental representation of the event and are easier for human comprehenders to process. In our study, we tested the popular language model BERT on two datasets derived from experimental studies to determine whether BERT’s predictions of prototypical event locations were also influenced by aspect. We found that, although BERT efficiently modelled the typicality of locations, it did so independently of the verb aspect. Even when the transformer was forced to focus on the verb phrase by masking the context words in the sentence, the typicality predictions were still accurate; in addition, we found aspect to have a stronger influence on the scores, with locations in the imperfective setting being associated with lo...

One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone... more One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone 3 are similar to or different from an underlying Tone 2 in Mandarin. In this study, we took a micro view to investigate the vowel height, duration, and rime structure in syllables, and their influence on the degree of Tone 3 sandhi through native speakers’ speech production and perception. It was found that vowel height and duration played important roles in shaping the F0 contour of the sandhied Tone 3 in production. As to perception, sandhied Tone 3 syllables with low vowels and longer duration were more likely to be perceived as Tone 3.

This paper examines the syntax of a morphologically complex double object construction in Mandari... more This paper examines the syntax of a morphologically complex double object construction in Mandarin, V-gei structure, and uses the results as the basis for a new account of a special phenomenon: sentences with an extra experiencer. Following Pylkkänen’s (2002) work on applicative phrases, we argue that different interpretations of the indirection object in double object construction can be accounted for by the differences between high and low applicatives. We adopt Paul and Whitman’s (2010) raising applicative hypothesis to account for double object construction, and argue that the indirect object moves to the specifier of low applicative projection to be licensed with the goal reading. Further, we argue that this indirect object may optionally raise to the high applicative phrase to obtain the benefactive thematic role. This helps to explain the phenomenon of indirect objects not always carrying a benefactive reading. We then propose that an argument may directly merge with the high...

Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 2019

Although there are similarities between the uses of the word dou in Mandarin and Cantonese, there... more Although there are similarities between the uses of the word dou in Mandarin and Cantonese, there are also striking differences that have rarely been discussed in the literature. As well as raising awareness of this fact, the present study contributes to our understanding of how dou’s different semantic functions can be structurally distinguished: in the first instance, by using classes of adverbs as structural anchors to examine dou’s uses as a universal quantifier, an adverbial, and a functional focus head. This study establishes that, while dou can function in these Chinese languages as a universal quantifier (albeit with language-specific contextual requirements), in Cantonese it is generally interpreted as an adverb expressing ‘also’: a reading that is seldom available in dou in Mandarin. It is also hoped that this case study will yield insights that will inform a broader discussion of the similarities and the differences between these two languages.

The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studi... more The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studies, given that typologically modifiers of nominals rarely occur before a demonstrative (cf. Greenberg 1963, Cinque 2005), and yet pre-demonstrative relative clauses are common in Chinese. This paper presents an analysis of syntax and information structure of Chinese relative clauses and shows results of a corpus study and a production experiment. It is argued that pre-demonstrative relative clauses structurally express Focus at the nominal periphery, similar to Focus Phrase at the left-periphery of a sentence à la Rizzi (1997), deriving by nominalinternal Focus movement. The result of this paper proves the claim of the nominal-clausal parallelism (Abney 1987; Chomsky 1970; Giusti 1996, 2006; Aboh 2004) and the edge (phase) property of DP (Citko 2014) with Chinese data, and shows that features of information structure have syntactic and interpretive effects, suggesting that such features ...

One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone... more One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone 3 are similar to or different from an underlying Tone 2 in Mandarin. In this study, we took a micro view to investigate the vowel height, duration, and rime structure in syllables, and their influence on the degree of Tone 3 sandhi through native speakers' speech production and perception. It was found that vowel height and duration played important roles in shaping the F0 contour of the sandhied Tone 3 in production. As to perception, sandhied Tone 3 syllables with low vowels and longer duration were more likely to be perceived as Tone 3.

Dans cet article nous souhaitons developper une reflexion theorique et epistemologique sur l'... more Dans cet article nous souhaitons developper une reflexion theorique et epistemologique sur l'approche ecologique a la lumiere de recentes possibilites ouvertes par le developpement d'outils d'oculometrie. Plus specifiquement, nous nous interessons a ce que les donnees d'oculometrie peuvent apporter dans l'etude du developpement des competences techno-semio-pedagogiques (Guichon, 2012) dans une telle approche. L'article presente une premiere partie developpant cette reflexion epistemologique d'un point de vue theorique et une deuxieme partie montrant une application de ces principes a une etude exploratoire dans un dispositif base sur le modele du Francais en (premiere) ligne (Mangenot, 2013) pour le chinois langue etrangere.

Mandarin third tone sandhi is traditionally assumed to be incompletely neutralizing in production... more Mandarin third tone sandhi is traditionally assumed to be incompletely neutralizing in production but completely neutralizing in perception, based on metalinguistic judgment tasks in which participants cannot reliably identify the underlying tone of syllables neutralized by tone sandhi. We performed a visual world eye-tracking study to see if implicit sensitivity to the differences between the surface forms influences participants' eye movement patterns, even if they cannot consciously access this for identification tasks. We found a slight trend in this direction, with participants looking more towards orthographic representations that match the underlying form of the neutralized syllable they hear. The results are statistically inconclusive, but suggest that this paradigm may be able to provide evidence that Mandarin neutralized tones are indeed incompletely neutralized, and that further research along these lines is warranted.

This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with t... more This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turntaking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around 11.4 million words of British English conversations and identify behavioural differences between speakers that are labelled for gender and age categories. We explore differences in language use and turn-taking dynamics and identify a range of characteristics that set the categories apart. We find that female speakers tend to produce more and slightly longer turns, while turns by male speakers feature a higher type-token ratio and a distinct range of minimal particles such as “eh”, “uh” and “em”. Across age groups, we observe, for instance, that swear words and laughter characterize young speakers’ talk, while old speakers tend to produce more truncated words. We then use the observed characteristics to predict gender and age labels of speakers per co...

Cross-linguistically, the way that focus is marked through prosody can depend on a variety of fac... more Cross-linguistically, the way that focus is marked through prosody can depend on a variety of factors, including local constraints on prosodic organization or the position of a word within the larger focus constituent. Here we report on a production study that explores the possible influence of prosodic organization and position on focus realization in Taiwan Mandarin. The materials consisted of sentences in which the syntactic subject consisted of a monosyllabic numeral, classifier, and noun. The context was manipulated to elicit narrow information focus (i.e., using wh-questions) on either the numeral, the noun, or the entire NP. The resulting target syllables were then analyzed in terms of their F0 characteristics, duration, and amplitude. The results revealed clear asymmetries in how the numeral and noun were realized in their corresponding singleword narrow focus condition versus in the NP focus condition, though confiding to the intrinsic tone-patterns (e.g., Tone 1 versus Ton...

International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2020

Preparation to use information and communication technology (ICT) is an important component of pr... more Preparation to use information and communication technology (ICT) is an important component of preservice language teachers’ training, and various existing teacher training models propose a range of strategies for increasing their technology knowledge and technology adoption rates. However, the relative effectiveness of these strategies remains unclear. Based on Tondeur et al.’s (2012) Synthesis of Qualitative Data model, which delineates the six main teacher preparation strategies (i.e., role modeling, reflection, instructional design, collaboration, authentic experience, and continuous feedback), the present study designed a 4 week training module for preservice language teachers and examined how these training strategies affected 63 participants’ perceived technology knowledge and attitudes toward technology adoption. Among the six training strategies, reflection and instructional design had the highest positive impacts on these preservice teachers’ self-reported knowledge about ...

The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal struct... more The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese lang...

Ohio State University. Libraries, May 1, 2021

Previous studies of linguistic areas have often adopted a mainly top-down approach, by first hypo... more Previous studies of linguistic areas have often adopted a mainly top-down approach, by first hypothesizing the existence of a linguistic area and then seeking the common linguistic features of that hypothetical area in order to justify its existence. In order to identify linguistic areas in East Asia in a different way, we adopt a mainly bottom-up approach by first investigating the values of the linguistic feature parameters of languages spoken in East Asia and then calculating those values to locate geographical clusters of languages sharing a certain degree of cross-family similarity. Based on 19 phonological features as binary parameters of 52 sample languages of East Asia, we visualize their within-family and cross-family similarities. Many of these similarities confirm the previous theories concerning linguistic areas, such as the Mainland Southeast Asia or the Qinghai-Gansu linguistic area. However, we also demonstrate some similarities that have received less attention thus far, namely between Ryukyuan and southern Sinitic languages.

The papers contained herein were, upon first submission, edited principally for style by members ... more The papers contained herein were, upon first submission, edited principally for style by members of the Executive Committee. These edited versions were incorporated by Herman Leung and Zachary O'Hagan into a draft manuscript that was circulated among authors either for their approval or for further editing. Following resubmission, final versions of papers were incorporated by Zachary O'Hagan into the monograph found here. Our goal has been the speedy publication of these proceedings, and as such, certain aspects-e.g., the complete unification of formatting-have been sacrificed. It is our belief that this does not detract from the final publication in any way.

Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing, 2021

With the recent rise in popularity of Transformer models in Natural Language Processing, research... more With the recent rise in popularity of Transformer models in Natural Language Processing, research efforts have been dedicated to the development of domain-adapted versions of BERT-like architectures. In this study, we focus on FinBERT, a Transformer model trained on text from the financial domain. By comparing its performances with the original BERT on a wide variety of financial text processing tasks, we found continual pretraining from the original model to be the more beneficial option. Domain-specific pretraining from scratch, conversely, seems to be less effective.

This study reports the results of two sets of corpus studies on the use of beneficiary structures... more This study reports the results of two sets of corpus studies on the use of beneficiary structures (wei-dong shi), one in modern and the other in ancient Chinese. First, we analyzed the semantic associations of the word weile ‘do something for something/someone’ in modern Chinese, using two corpora and the word-embedding model. The results were in line with semantic analyses proposed in the Semantic-Map Model. Second, based on an examination of all the sentences expressing beneficiary meanings in Zuo’s Commentary and Mencius, we established that the beneficiary structure in those works involves a light-verb structure that should be syntactically distinguished from other such structures that introduce causative and intentional events. As well as providing some new evidence regarding the semantic content of the wei-dong shi in modern Chinese, we present structural evidence of its source, which can be dated to the pre-Qin period, as shown by the examples in the two target ancient-Chines...

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2020

This paper reports on two speech-production experiments focused on Putonghua and Taiwan Mandarin ... more This paper reports on two speech-production experiments focused on Putonghua and Taiwan Mandarin sentence-final particles and wh-phrases that have interrogative or indefinite readings in three contexts: yes/no questions, wh-questions, and statements. Sentence-final particles were found to influence focus-prosody through right-edge shortening and lowering of F0 and intensity of wh-phrases, thus distinguishing wh-interrogatives from indefinites and questions from statements. Speakers adopt multidimensional acoustic strategies to shape intonation: while maintaining the lexical tones, prosody interacts with the organization imposed by syntax, semantics, and focus. The two varieties of Mandarin differ in the extent to which their prosodic differences represent such syntactic-semantic information.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless lan... more The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I show that although Mandarin is an articleless language, its nominal expressions involve structures larger than a Noun Phrase (NP). I argue that two distinct projections, Demonstrative Phrase (DemP) and Unit Phrase (UnitP), should be identified in the structure above NP. Second, based on the proposal, I show that various ambiguous expressions, in fact, involve different levels of nominal structures, and that they can be disambiguated under specific contexts. The data in this paper suggest that classifiers are better analyzed as the head of UnitP that dominates NP (and takes number phrase as its specifier), and that DemP dominates UnitP, structurally. I also argue that true possessors should be distinguished from possessive modifiers, and I show that their structural difference explains the restriction concerning phenomena of extractions. Based on data of the fixe ordering of demonstrative-classifier-noun, the distribution and the interp...

Prior studies on event knowledge in sentence comprehension have shown that the aspect of the main... more Prior studies on event knowledge in sentence comprehension have shown that the aspect of the main verb plays an important role in the processing of non-core semantic roles, such as locations: when the aspect of the main verb is imperfective, locations become more salient in the mental representation of the event and are easier for human comprehenders to process. In our study, we tested the popular language model BERT on two datasets derived from experimental studies to determine whether BERT’s predictions of prototypical event locations were also influenced by aspect. We found that, although BERT efficiently modelled the typicality of locations, it did so independently of the verb aspect. Even when the transformer was forced to focus on the verb phrase by masking the context words in the sentence, the typicality predictions were still accurate; in addition, we found aspect to have a stronger influence on the scores, with locations in the imperfective setting being associated with lo...

One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone... more One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone 3 are similar to or different from an underlying Tone 2 in Mandarin. In this study, we took a micro view to investigate the vowel height, duration, and rime structure in syllables, and their influence on the degree of Tone 3 sandhi through native speakers’ speech production and perception. It was found that vowel height and duration played important roles in shaping the F0 contour of the sandhied Tone 3 in production. As to perception, sandhied Tone 3 syllables with low vowels and longer duration were more likely to be perceived as Tone 3.

This paper examines the syntax of a morphologically complex double object construction in Mandari... more This paper examines the syntax of a morphologically complex double object construction in Mandarin, V-gei structure, and uses the results as the basis for a new account of a special phenomenon: sentences with an extra experiencer. Following Pylkkänen’s (2002) work on applicative phrases, we argue that different interpretations of the indirection object in double object construction can be accounted for by the differences between high and low applicatives. We adopt Paul and Whitman’s (2010) raising applicative hypothesis to account for double object construction, and argue that the indirect object moves to the specifier of low applicative projection to be licensed with the goal reading. Further, we argue that this indirect object may optionally raise to the high applicative phrase to obtain the benefactive thematic role. This helps to explain the phenomenon of indirect objects not always carrying a benefactive reading. We then propose that an argument may directly merge with the high...

Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, 2019

Although there are similarities between the uses of the word dou in Mandarin and Cantonese, there... more Although there are similarities between the uses of the word dou in Mandarin and Cantonese, there are also striking differences that have rarely been discussed in the literature. As well as raising awareness of this fact, the present study contributes to our understanding of how dou’s different semantic functions can be structurally distinguished: in the first instance, by using classes of adverbs as structural anchors to examine dou’s uses as a universal quantifier, an adverbial, and a functional focus head. This study establishes that, while dou can function in these Chinese languages as a universal quantifier (albeit with language-specific contextual requirements), in Cantonese it is generally interpreted as an adverb expressing ‘also’: a reading that is seldom available in dou in Mandarin. It is also hoped that this case study will yield insights that will inform a broader discussion of the similarities and the differences between these two languages.

The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studi... more The syntax and the function of Chinese relative clauses have been a hot issue in linguistic studies, given that typologically modifiers of nominals rarely occur before a demonstrative (cf. Greenberg 1963, Cinque 2005), and yet pre-demonstrative relative clauses are common in Chinese. This paper presents an analysis of syntax and information structure of Chinese relative clauses and shows results of a corpus study and a production experiment. It is argued that pre-demonstrative relative clauses structurally express Focus at the nominal periphery, similar to Focus Phrase at the left-periphery of a sentence à la Rizzi (1997), deriving by nominalinternal Focus movement. The result of this paper proves the claim of the nominal-clausal parallelism (Abney 1987; Chomsky 1970; Giusti 1996, 2006; Aboh 2004) and the edge (phase) property of DP (Citko 2014) with Chinese data, and shows that features of information structure have syntactic and interpretive effects, suggesting that such features ...

One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone... more One interesting linguistic question has been whether and how the characteristics of sandhied Tone 3 are similar to or different from an underlying Tone 2 in Mandarin. In this study, we took a micro view to investigate the vowel height, duration, and rime structure in syllables, and their influence on the degree of Tone 3 sandhi through native speakers' speech production and perception. It was found that vowel height and duration played important roles in shaping the F0 contour of the sandhied Tone 3 in production. As to perception, sandhied Tone 3 syllables with low vowels and longer duration were more likely to be perceived as Tone 3.

Dans cet article nous souhaitons developper une reflexion theorique et epistemologique sur l'... more Dans cet article nous souhaitons developper une reflexion theorique et epistemologique sur l'approche ecologique a la lumiere de recentes possibilites ouvertes par le developpement d'outils d'oculometrie. Plus specifiquement, nous nous interessons a ce que les donnees d'oculometrie peuvent apporter dans l'etude du developpement des competences techno-semio-pedagogiques (Guichon, 2012) dans une telle approche. L'article presente une premiere partie developpant cette reflexion epistemologique d'un point de vue theorique et une deuxieme partie montrant une application de ces principes a une etude exploratoire dans un dispositif base sur le modele du Francais en (premiere) ligne (Mangenot, 2013) pour le chinois langue etrangere.

Mandarin third tone sandhi is traditionally assumed to be incompletely neutralizing in production... more Mandarin third tone sandhi is traditionally assumed to be incompletely neutralizing in production but completely neutralizing in perception, based on metalinguistic judgment tasks in which participants cannot reliably identify the underlying tone of syllables neutralized by tone sandhi. We performed a visual world eye-tracking study to see if implicit sensitivity to the differences between the surface forms influences participants' eye movement patterns, even if they cannot consciously access this for identification tasks. We found a slight trend in this direction, with participants looking more towards orthographic representations that match the underlying form of the neutralized syllable they hear. The results are statistically inconclusive, but suggest that this paradigm may be able to provide evidence that Mandarin neutralized tones are indeed incompletely neutralized, and that further research along these lines is warranted.

This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with t... more This paper examines gender and age salience and (stereo)typicality in British English talk with the aim to predict gender and age categories based on lexical, phrasal and turntaking features. We examine the SpokenBNC, a corpus of around 11.4 million words of British English conversations and identify behavioural differences between speakers that are labelled for gender and age categories. We explore differences in language use and turn-taking dynamics and identify a range of characteristics that set the categories apart. We find that female speakers tend to produce more and slightly longer turns, while turns by male speakers feature a higher type-token ratio and a distinct range of minimal particles such as “eh”, “uh” and “em”. Across age groups, we observe, for instance, that swear words and laughter characterize young speakers’ talk, while old speakers tend to produce more truncated words. We then use the observed characteristics to predict gender and age labels of speakers per co...

Cross-linguistically, the way that focus is marked through prosody can depend on a variety of fac... more Cross-linguistically, the way that focus is marked through prosody can depend on a variety of factors, including local constraints on prosodic organization or the position of a word within the larger focus constituent. Here we report on a production study that explores the possible influence of prosodic organization and position on focus realization in Taiwan Mandarin. The materials consisted of sentences in which the syntactic subject consisted of a monosyllabic numeral, classifier, and noun. The context was manipulated to elicit narrow information focus (i.e., using wh-questions) on either the numeral, the noun, or the entire NP. The resulting target syllables were then analyzed in terms of their F0 characteristics, duration, and amplitude. The results revealed clear asymmetries in how the numeral and noun were realized in their corresponding singleword narrow focus condition versus in the NP focus condition, though confiding to the intrinsic tone-patterns (e.g., Tone 1 versus Ton...

International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2020

Preparation to use information and communication technology (ICT) is an important component of pr... more Preparation to use information and communication technology (ICT) is an important component of preservice language teachers’ training, and various existing teacher training models propose a range of strategies for increasing their technology knowledge and technology adoption rates. However, the relative effectiveness of these strategies remains unclear. Based on Tondeur et al.’s (2012) Synthesis of Qualitative Data model, which delineates the six main teacher preparation strategies (i.e., role modeling, reflection, instructional design, collaboration, authentic experience, and continuous feedback), the present study designed a 4 week training module for preservice language teachers and examined how these training strategies affected 63 participants’ perceived technology knowledge and attitudes toward technology adoption. Among the six training strategies, reflection and instructional design had the highest positive impacts on these preservice teachers’ self-reported knowledge about ...

INTERSPEECH, 2019

We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types ... more We report results of a speech production experiment about the intonation of three sentence types in Taiwan Mandarin, and discuss our results with implications for focus acoustics, and semantic-syntactic theories of sentence final particles and wh-indeterminates. Wh-indeterminates refer to wh-phrases that are ambiguous between interrogative and indefinite readings. In Mandarin, different interpretations of wh-indeterminates are not morphologically marked, but can be disambiguated in specific sentence contexts marked by sentence final particles. In this study, we systematically examined the intonation of wh-questions and yes/no questions by using declarative sentences as the baseline. The results show that both wh-and yes/no questions exhibit F0 prominence, and lengthening effects on regions containing sentence-final particles and wh-phrases, but the effects were stronger in wh-questions. Examining the duration and F0 range, we found that wh-phrases and sentence final particles together formed specific acoustic patterns to distinguish questions from declarative sentences. The findings suggest that the prosodic organization interacts with other internal structural organization.

In addition to deciding what to say, interlocutors have to decide how to say it. One of the impor... more In addition to deciding what to say, interlocutors have to decide how to say it. One of the important tasks of linguists is then to model how differences in acoustic patterns influence the interpretation of a sentence. In light of previous studies on how prosodic structure convey discourse-level of information in a sentence, this study makes use of a speech production experiment to investigate how expressions related to different information packaging, such as information focus, corrective focus, and old information, are prosodically realized within a complex nominal. Special attention was paid to the sequence of " numeral-classifier-noun " in Mandarin, which consists of closely related sub-syntactic units internally, and provides a phonetically controlled environment comparable to previous phonetic studies on focus prominence at the sentential level. The result shows that a multi-dimensional strategy is used in focus-marking, and that focus prosody is sensitive to the size of focus domain and is observable in various lexical tonal environments in Mandarin.

How various types of focus differ with respect to exhaustivity has been a topic of enduring inter... more How various types of focus differ with respect to exhaustivity has been a topic of enduring interest in language studies. However, most of the theoretical work explicating such associations has done so cross-linguistically, and little research has been done on how people process and respond to them during language comprehension. This study therefore investigates the associations between the concept of exhaustivity and three focus types in Chinese (wh, cleft, and only foci) using a trichotomous-response design in two experiments: a forced-choice judgment and a self-paced reading experiment, both with adult native speakers. Its results show that, whether engaged in conscious decision-making or an implicit comprehension process, the participants distinguished only-focus and cleft-focus from wh-focus clearly, and also that there are specific differences between only-focus and cleft-focus in conscious decision-making. This implies that, in terms of the relationship between exhaustivity and the focus types under investigation, cleft-focus and only-focus behave very similarly during language comprehension despite the existence of some fine distinctions between them. In other words, the potential linguistic levels that exhaustivity encodes in Chinese cleft-focus render it more similar to only-focus than to wh-focus. These results are broadly in line with the semantic account that distinguishes cleft from only-focus, i.e., that cleft encodes exhaustivity in not-at-issue presupposition and only-focus encodes exhaustivity in at-issue assertion, while both express semantically encoded exhaustivity, triggering robust language-processing patterns that differ from patterns of wh-focus in Chinese.