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Tentative schedule:
10/21 12:10pm-1:10pm Dr. Yu-Fu Chien
(Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai )
"The processing and representation of Mandarin tone sandhi words in isolation and in context: Evidence from behavioral and ERP experiments"
Abstract: During spoken word recognition, listeners constantly map the variable acoustic signal onto the stored mental representation. However, the process of the mapping may involve tackling the mismatch between the surface and mental representations. Therefore, understanding how listeners resolve the mismatch is key to understanding how they achieve successful language comprehension. Tonal alternations, or tone sandhi, in Mandarin Chinese, henceforth Mandarin, are great test cases to investigate this issue since tone sandhi words exhibit a strong mismatch between the two representational levels. Mandarin Tone3, henceforth T3, with a tone value of 213 in its citation form, is realized as a high-rising tone with a tone value of 35 when followed by another T3. It is realized as a low-falling tone with a tone value of 21 when followed by T1, T2, or T4. The former tonal alternation is named third tone sandhi, and the latter, half third sandhi. We used an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment to investigate the processing and the representation of Mandarin T3 in disyllabic words. Results showed that T3(21) and T3(213) primes significantly facilitated the lexical decision times of T3(35)+T3 and T3(21)+T2 targets. In addition, the size of the priming effects was not modulated by the target type or the target frequency. Since both forms of primes activated the targets to the same degree regardless of target frequency, we argued that the representation of Mandarin T3 may be an abstract low tone. At the discourse level, we utilized the technique of event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate how information structural status influences the processing of Mandarin third tone sandhi words. In a naturalness judgment task, participants had to judge the naturalness of the answers in question-answer pairs, where the first syllable of third tone sandhi targets was pronounced as a post-sandhi form (35), a pre-sandhi form (21), or an incorrect form (51). Moreover, the critical third tone sandhi words had two different information structural properties. That is, they were placed either in the focus or in the background position. Results of naturalness ratings showed that the rating of the post-sandhi form was significantly higher than that of the pre-sandhi and incorrect form, and the rating of the pre-sandhi form was significantly higher than that of the incorrect form. ERP results revealed that the amplitude of the late positive component (LPC) increased as the naturalness rating decreased, indicating that the participants had to employ more cognitive resources to reanalyze the unnatural forms of the sandhi words. Furthermore, the LPC effect elicited by the incorrect form in the background position was more posteriorly distributed than that in the focus position, while this pattern of the LPC effect yielded by the pre-sandhi form was not observed, suggesting that the incorrect and post-sandhi forms were processed using different neural mechanisms in the focus and background positions, but the pre-sandhi and post-sandhi forms were processed using the same neural mechanisms in these two positions. Taken together, these two experiments demonstrate how Mandarin T3 is represented in the mental lexicon, and how Mandarin sandhi words are processed at the lexical and discourse levels.
12/9 13:30pm-16:00pm Dr. Lauren Hall-Lew
(Professor and Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics, University of Edinburgh)
Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfJeQOSKC9xPEjLdp1-bynbm_49pjLCQLu5-_tSe5SrbKlwzA/viewform?usp=sf_link
"Vowel Space, Affect, and Mental Illness"
Abstract: Recent work in sociolinguistics has demonstrated a link between vowel production and affect (displays of emotion), particularly in English (D’Onofrio & Eckert, 2020; Pratt 2021) and Taiwanese Mandarin (Wan, et al., 2024). A speaker’s overall vowel space area (VSA) has received particular attention as a linguistic variable that signals affective stance (D’Onofrio et al., 2019; Kiesling 2018; Pratt 2023), although the direction of correlation is not consistent across studies (Gratton, in prep). From a different disciplinary perspective, VSA has been found to differentiate speakers with and without clinical depression (Helfer, et al., 2013; Scherer, et al., 2016). Similar work posits that the biomechanical effects of depression will result in “less articulatory effort” with vowels predicted to be closer to “resting position” (Tolkmitt, et al., 1982: 221, 220; Miley 2019). In this talk, I present recent empirical work that attempts to bridge these two areas of research.
12/9 13:30pm-16:00pm Dr. Rebecca Starr
(Associate Professor, National University of Singapore)
"Variation in the Outer Circle: Language variation and change amid transnational dialect contact in Singapore "
Abstract: Scholarship in language variation and change has investigated the mechanisms and outcomes of dialect contact in a number of settings around the world. In variationist work, contact-induced change is typically argued to stem primarily from prolonged interpersonal contact, rather than from short-term travel or media exposure, as regular interaction is thought to be necessary for the transmission of complex linguistic features. In research in the world Englishes and contact linguistics traditions, however, media exposure is often pointed to as a source of language change; moreover, the notion that speakers adopt new features as a result of short-term travel and media consumption is a commonly-circulating discourse in postcolonial societies. This talk considers the impact of three major sources of transnational dialect contact — institutional exonormativity, transnational mobility, and media consumption — on variation and change in the English and Mandarin spoken in Singapore, a multilingual nation in Southeast Asia. The issues and findings surveyed here underscore the utility of applying variationist approaches to world English-speaking communities and other postcolonial settings. Correspondingly, they illustrate how research in such settings may shed new light on basic assumptions in the field of language variation and change.
12/17 14:00pm-15:30pm Dr. Chien-Han Hsiao
(National Taiwan Normal University)
"The effect of language activation level in bilingual phonetic and phonological production: Evidence from tonal production in Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switching"
Abstract: This study investigates the extent to which bilingual speech production and language activation interact and presents a corpus study on the relations between the level of language activation and the phonetic and phonological realizations of suprasegmental features at code-switching (CS) boundaries. Previous studies on bilingual cognition have identified a switch-cost in code-switching due to a temporary increase in cognitive load caused by undoing the inhibition on the language that is not in use. The switch-cost, which can result in less controlled segmental production (Goldrick et al. 2014; Fricke et al. 2016), has been found to be less evident when a speaker uses bilingual mode (where two languages are activated) rather than monolingual mode (where one language is activated) (Olson 2016). As these studies mainly focused on the phonetic production of stop consonants, the current work explores the scale of the effect of language activation level by examining suprasegmental production at the phonetic and phonological levels. As a phonological rule, Mandarin tone sandhi realizes the first of two adjacent Low (L) tones (i.e., L+L) as a Rising (R) tone (i.e., R+L). At a CS boundary from Mandarin to Taiwanese, a Mandarin L followed by a Taiwanese L creates a potential cross-language sandhi environment. This study examines the production of CS-boundary Mandarin L and asks: 1) Phonetically, are CS-boundary L produced differently in the language modes of Mandarin-dominant, Taiwanese-dominant, and bilingual? 2) Phonologically, in a cross-language sandhi environment, is the sandhi realization rate influenced by the matrix language (the language supplying the grammatical frame in CS and hence at a higher level of activation) of the sentence?
Registration:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgpCLM-QDvzWUuCUwgxOIdmEXFppu-_03HmEtdiJXwR1ugnw/viewform
Online meeting link: https://meet.google.com/siu-dhhp-bzw
Location: HB203 (人社二館203)
12/18 14:00pm-15:30pm Dr. Jungah Lee (Chosan University, Korea )
"Voices of the Marginalized: Linguistic Adaptation and Identity in Minority Communities"
Abstract: This talk explores the linguistic experiences and adaptations of minority groups, including North Korean refugees, Goryeoin communities, nonstandard accented speakers, and people with hearing impairment deaf communities. Through sociophonetic and sociolinguistic perspectives, it examines how these groups navigate language use, identity, and social integration in diverse linguistic environments. Drawing on empirical research and case studies, the presentation highlights the interplay between language and social adaptation, offering insights into the broader implications for linguistic diversity, bilingualism, and second dialect acquisition. This discussion aims to foster an understanding of the challenges and resilience of these communities, as well as their significant contributions to linguistic and cultural diversity.
Registration:
Online meeting link: https://meet.google.com/siu-dhhp-bzw
Location: HC402 (人社三館402)
01/10 10am- Dr. Jieun Lee (University of Kansas)
"Individual Differences in Native Speech Perception and Their Relations to Learning Nonnative Phonological Contrasts"
Abstract: This talk will explore my research within a modern theoretical framework where listeners perceive speech categories in a gradient manner, preserving fine-grained details of acoustic information to enable more flexible speech processing. This approach highlights the adaptability of the speech perception mechanism, challenging the earlier theoretical view known as Categorical Perception (CP) (Liberman et al., 1957). Empirical results from my research suggest that gradient representations of speech categories help resolve issues of ambiguity and variance in speech input during the speech perception process. I will discuss data on speech perception in
both native and nonnative languages at the individual level to understand why some listeners process continuous speech inputs more continuously and identify the benefits of this gradient perception, phenomena unexplained by the CP framework.
One possible benefit involves investigating listeners’ adaptability under challenging contexts, such as when a primary acoustic cue is obscured, requiring reliance on secondary cues. My findings indicate that when primary cues are ambiguous and uninformative in native speech, listeners tend to depend on secondary acoustic cues to compensate for uncertainty during phoneme identification. However, this trade-off between cues (i.e., increase reliance on secondary cues) does not occur uniformly across all listeners, indicating significant individual differences. In my talk, I will argue that these differences can be predicted by the degree to which listeners perceive speech categories gradiently, as assessed through a Visual Analogue Scaling (VAS) task.
Another scenario where listeners benefit from perceptual flexibility derived from gradient speech perception is in perceiving nonnative speech. Given that gradient listeners are more resilient to poor and degraded acoustic properties, I will discuss whether these listeners can use such adaptability to perceive exotic nonnative speech sounds by adjusting their perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions to define nonnative speech categories. The discussion will include a study targeting native English listeners learning a Korean three-way stop contrast and the results of High Variability Phonetic Training, which provided short-term exposure to the target Korean
contrast. We will explore the extension of listeners’ adaptability and perceptual flexibility even in extremely challenging situations, such as nonnative speech perception, and discuss the transfer of within-category acoustic cue sensitivities from native to nonnative speech perception.
Registration:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdHhZxjqAkBFqCunpsgiWfb2Gpic-d1yFJFW8KpRZBRD_5N5w/viewform
Online meeting link: https://meet.google.com/siu-dhhp-bzw
Location: Online meeting
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