Phonological Priming with Non-words in Mandarin-speaking Children and Adults
with Dr. Hui-Chun Yang 

This study aims to explore the roles of sub-syllabic units (i.e., onsets, rhymes and tones) in word production of Mandarin speakers, and further taps onto the developmental differences in phonological processing between children and adults. We adopted a cross-modal picture-word interference task to investigate the phonological priming effect, and we utilized non-word primes to reduce confounding lexical competition effect. Our findings suggest that the phonological representations of Mandarin speakers develop from holistic units into those with an onset-based structure as their age increase. The roles of onsets, rhymes and tones in Mandarin phonological encoding are further discussed.

Chang, C. C., & Yang, H. C. (2023). Investigation of Mandarin Word Production in Children and Adults: Evidence from Phonological Priming with Non-words. Language and Speech, 66(2), 500-529.

Exploring the L2 Perception-production Link in English Vowel Imitation by Mandarin Speakers
with Chun-Ting Chien, Dr. Yu-An Lu

This study investigates the link between perception and production of an English vowel contrast /ɛ/-/æ/ by L1-Mandarin speakers. All participants completed a perceptual categorization and a phonetic imitation task during experimental sessions, and the stimuli were resynthesized from natural tokens head-had [hɛd-hæd] to construct spectral and duration continua. We find that: (1) L1-Mandarin speakers utilize spectral and duration cues in a trade-off manner for vowel categorization in perception; (2) the link between perception and production is modulated by both articulatory and phonological factors for vowel quality, while the two are more directly linked at the acoustic-phonetic level for vowel duration. The distinct patterns in L2 learners of English and individual differences are addressed.

Chang, C. C., Chien, C. T. & Lu, Y. A. (2023). The Link Between Perception and Production of English Vowel Contrasts in Non-Native Speakers. In Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

Chang, C. C., Chien, C. T. & Lu, Y. A. (2022). Exploring the L2 Perception-production Link in English Vowel Imitation by Mandarin Speakers. Poster presentation at the 18th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Jun 23-25, Virtual meeting.

Neural Correlates of Phonotactic Context Effect in Speech Categorization
with Dr. Chia-Hsuan Liao, Dr. Yu-An Lu

The study examines the neural manifestation of phonotactic context effect during speech categorization in Mandarin speakers. Using a vowel categorization task with EEG recordings, we found that phonotactic contexts: (1) bias the neural responses of the ambiguous vowel token toward different ends with numeric P1 amplitude differences, and (2) significantly reduce the N1 and P2 differences between the two unambiguous vowel tokens. These findings indicate that phonological contexts modulate the neural encoding of acoustic-phonetic information during speech perception.

Chang, C. C., Liao, C. H. & Lu, Y. A. (2022). Neural Correlates of Phonotactic Context Effect in Speech Categorization. Poster presentation at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language Conference. Oct 6-8, Philadelphia, PA, USA.