Research

Since I joined GIL at NTU in 2016, I have initiated several research projects. They are summarized as follows.

1. Phonetic details in speech plan: Following up my PhD dissertation, a series of experiments using startling auditory stimulus (SAS; stimulus > 120dB) are designed to discuss following topics:

a. How musical training background affects speakers' production with respect to the duration and pitch of the target response? (Chiu, 2020)

b. While SAS-elicited responses may uncover details that are pre-specified in the speech plans, what are the physiological constraints associated with SAS-elicited response and how are they dissociated from pre-planned details?

2. Auditory perturbation: Successful speech production relies on execution of motor commands in both feedforward and feedback control. The experiments using SAS introduces a way to investigate how speech plans can be performed in feedforward control. On the other hand, how feedback affects the execution of speech plans also yields significant linguistic implications. Early studies show that when auditory feedback is perturbed, compensatory behaviours would be generated in order to achieve the functional goal in the speech plan. The current project targets Taiwan Mandarin (TM) on how TM speakers would compensate their production when their auditory feedback is perturbed.

3. Taiwan Mandarin sound merger: As acoustics and articulation do not always bear a one-to-one mapping relationship, similarities measured in acoustics may not necessarily reflect the uniform in articulatory mechanisms. Using ultrasound allows us to uncover how tongue postures may contribute to such sound merging. An increasing number of research attention has been drawn to sound merging Taiwan Mandarin (TM), including the merger between dental [s] and retroflex [ʂ]. Current projects include Chiu et al. (2020) and Chiu and Lu (online first).

4. Secondary articulatory in Sino-Tibetan languages: Starting from 2016, I joined Dr. Jackson Sun's research projects on a number of dialects of Horpa, one of the Sino-Tibetan languages in Sichuan, China. Being largely unexamined, Horpa dialects share a similar secondary articulation in vowels, contrasting with their plain vowel counterparts. The observed articulatory mechanism is not only limited to Horpa, but also found in other unrelated languages. The most recent published work is on the pharyngealization in Northern Horpa (Chiu and Sun, 2020).