Yiya Chen

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Zhushan Mandarin

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

Zhushan Mandarin () is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 639-3; code: cmn) spoken in the Zhushan... more Zhushan Mandarin () is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 639-3; code: cmn) spoken in the Zhushan county (), which belongs to the city of Shiyan () in Hubei Province (), the People’s Republic of China. As shown in Figure 1, the county borders the city of Chongqing () to the south and Shaanxi Province () to the north. It has an area of 3,586 km² and a population of about 4.7 million residents (Hubei Province Annals Committee 2017). The general consensus is that it is a Mandarin dialect (LAC 2012). However, there have been debates on the proper classification of this dialect as belonging to the Jianghuai Mandarin group () (e.g. Coblin 2005, X. B. Liu 2007) or to the Southwestern Mandarin group () (e.g. Ting 1996, X. C. Liu 2005, L. Li 2009).

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Notice from the Board of Editors

by Felix Ameka, Yiya Chen, and Umberto Ansaldo

Linguistics, 2000

Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation: Log in; Register; Help; German; English; Take a Tour; Sig... more Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation: Log in; Register; Help; German; English; Take a Tour; Sign up for a free trial; Subscribe. DGM Logo. Search Advanced SearchHelp. My Content (1) Recently viewed (1). Notice from the Board ... My Searches (0). (0) Shopping Cart. Check Out. SUBJECTS: Art and Music; Books and Publishing, Libraries, Information and Documentation; Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies; General Reference Works; History; Law; Linguistics, Communications; Literary Studies; Mathematics; Medicine; Natural Sciences; Philosophy ...

Let's You Do That: Enquiries into the Cognitive Burdens of Dialogue

by Catriona Havard, Yiya Chen, and Ellen Bard

Most discussions of audience design assume that it rests on speakers' uptake of information about... more Most discussions of audience design assume that it rests on speakers' uptake of information about listeners' knowledge. The cognitive difficulty hypothesis in press a) proposes that speakers provide less tailored design when the cognitive cost of uptake or recall increases. Yet the principle of mutual responsibility implies that cognitive load should to be shared efficiently: listeners should provide information which would be difficult for speakers to discover themselves. Two map task experiments examine speakers' uptake of information about listeners' knowledge and their responses to listeners' difficulties. Both experiments show that uptake is poor where it would be most useful: speakers attend very little to feedback in the form of simulated listener eye-tracks which directly indicate discrepancies between participants' knowledge. The second experiment shows that verbal feedback, though harder to interpret than gaze, generates more helpful responses in the form of Dialogue Transactions which correct listener errors and in the form of Game Moves which focus on listener knowledge. We propose that the instructor's priority is relating her own knowledge and that she will be deflected only when overtly called on to acknowledge a discrepancy between her own knowledge and the listener's.

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Representation and Processing of Lexical Tone and Tonal Variants: Evidence from the Mismatch Negativity

PloS one, 2015

Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical represent... more Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental representation and neural processing of lexical tones. Native speakers of Standard Chinese (SC) participated in an oddball electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. All stimuli have the same segments (ma) but different lexical tones: level [T1], rising [T2], and dipping [T3]. In connected speech with a T3T3 sequence, the first T3 may undergo allophonic change and is produced with a rising pitch contour (T3V), similar to the lexical T2 pitch contour. Four oddball conditions were constructed (T1/T3, T3/T1, T2/T3, T3/T2; standard/deviant). All four conditions elicited MMN effects, with the T1-T3 pair eliciting comparable MMNs, but the T2-T3 pair...

Immediate integration of different types of prosodic information during on-line spoken language comprehension: An ERP study

Brain Research, 2011

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of pro... more An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary as well as their interaction in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese question-answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answer sentence is a syntactically ambiguous phrase, with a prosodic phrase boundary at the immediate left side of the critical word in the carrier sentence. Meanwhile, the critical word was accented. We manipulated the question context while keeping the speech signal of the answer sentence constant, which gives rise to congruent and in-congruent questionanswer pairs with violations of prosodic prominence, prosodic boundary, or both. Results showed that prosodic prominence violation evoked a frontal-central negative effect (270-510 ms), while prosodic boundary violation elicited a broadly distributed negative effect (270-510 ms and 510-660 ms). The effect of combined prominence-boundary violation was similar to that of the single prosodic prominence violation. Furthermore, there was an interaction between the effect of prosodic prominence violation and the effect of prosodic boundary violation in the window latency of 270-510 ms, which suggests an immediate interaction between the semantic processing of prosodic prominence and the syntactic processing of prosodic boundary during spoken language comprehension. In addition, a detailed analysis of the obtained negativity effects showed that the size of the negative effect to the prosodic boundary violation was increased by an additional prosodic prominence violation, but the size of the negative effect to the prosodic prominence violation was not affected by an additional prosodic boundary violation, which suggests an asymmetry between the effects of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary.

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Incrementality in Planning of Speech During Speaking and Reading Aloud: Evidence from Eye-Tracking

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

Speaking is an incremental process where planning and articulation interleave. While incrementali... more Speaking is an incremental process where planning and articulation interleave. While incrementality has been studied in reading and online speech production separately, it has not been directly compared within one investigation. This study set out to compare the extent of planning incrementality in online sentence formulation versus reading aloud and how discourse context may constrain the planning scope of utterance preparation differently in these two modes of speech planning. Two eye-tracking experiments are reported: participants either described pictures of transitive events (Experiment 1) or read aloud the written descriptions of those events (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the information status of an object character was manipulated in the discourse preceding each picture or sentence. In the Literal condition, participants heard a story where object character was literally mentioned (e.g., fly). In the No Mention condition, stories did not literally mention nor prime the object character depicted on the picture or written in the sentence. The target response was expected to have the same structure and content in all conditions (The frog catches the fly). During naming, the results showed shorter speech onset latencies in the Literal condition than in the No Mention condition. However, no significant differences in gaze durations were found. In contrast, during reading, there were no significant differences in speech onset latencies but there were significantly longer gaze durations to the target picture/word in the Literal than in the No Mention condition. Our results shot that planning is more incremental during reading than during naming and that discourse context can be helpful during speaker but may hinder during reading aloud. Taken together our results suggest that on-line planning of response is affected by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors.

Shanghai Chinese

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2015

A corpus study of the 3

Interspeech, 2007

Signature of prosody in tonal realization: Evidence from Standard Chinese

Acoustical Society of America Journal, May 1, 2001

It is by now widely accepted that the articulation of speech is influenced by the prosodic struct... more It is by now widely accepted that the articulation of speech is influenced by the prosodic structure into which the utterance is organized. Furthermore, the effect of prosody on F0 realization has been shown to be mainly phonological [Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986); Selkirk and Shen (1990)]. This paper presents data from the F0 realizations of lexical tones in Standard Chinese and shows that prosodic factors may influence the articulation of a lexical tone and induce phonetic variations in its surface F0 contours, similar to the phonetic effect of prosody on segment articulation [de Jong (1995); Keating and Foureron (1997)]. Data were elicited from four native speakers of Standard Chinese producing all four lexical tones in different tonal contexts and under various focus conditions (i.e., under focus, no focus, and post focus), with three renditions for each condition. The observed F0 variations are argued to be best analyzed as resulted from prosodically driven differences in the phonetic implementation of the lexical tonal targets, which in turn is induced by pragmatically driven differences in how distinctive an underlying tonal target should be realized. Implications of this study on the phonetic implementation of phonological tonal targets will also be discussed.

An acoustic study of contextual tonal variation in Tianjin Mandarin

Journal of Phonetics, 2016

Ersu

Journal of the International Phonetic Association

ABSTRACT

Predicting tonal realizations in one Chinese dialect from another

Speech Communication, 2015

Xumi (part 1)

Xumi (part 2)

The effect of word frequency and neighbourhood density on tone merge

This paper studies the effect of word frequency and neighbourhood density on lexical tone merge i... more This paper studies the effect of word frequency and neighbourhood density on lexical tone merge in Dalian Mandarin. Monosyllabic words with two lexical falling tones (i.e. Tone1 and Tone 4) are produced by 60 native speakers from two different generations (middle-aged vs. young). The stimuli consist of three conditions: high neighbourhood density with high word frequency (HDHF), high neighbourhood density with low word frequency (HDLF) and low neighbourhood density with high word frequency (LDHF). Syllable duration as well as the F 0 curve and F 0 's velocity profile of tonal contours are quantitatively analysed through linear-mixed modelling and functional data analysis. Results show that Tone 1 and Tone 4 are near-merged in Dalian Mandarin. Word frequency and neighbourhood density show no effect on duration, but do affect the concave and convex of F 0 curves and the slope of F 0 's velocity profile, which suggests their role in the tone merge process.

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Multi-level processing of phonetic variants in speech production and visual word processing: evidence from Mandarin lexical tones

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Two picture-word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological proc... more Two picture-word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological processing in speech production and visual word processing. In both experiments, responses were significantly faster either when distractor and target matched in tone category, but had different overt realisations (toneme condition) or when target and distractor matched in overt realisation, but mismatched in tone category (contour condition). Tone 3 sandhi is an allophone of Beijing Mandarin Tone 3 (T3). Its contour is similar to another tone, Tone 2. In Experiment 1, sandhi picture naming was faster with contour (Tone 2) and toneme (low Tone 3) distractors, compared to control distractors. This indicates both category and context-specific representations are activated in sandhi word production. In Experiment 2, both contour (Tone 2) and toneme (low Tone 3) picture naming was facilitated by visually presented sandhi distractors, compared to controls, evidence that category and context-specific instantiated representations are automatically activated during processing of visually presented words. Combined, the results point to multi-level processing of phonology, whether words are overtly produced or processed visually. Interestingly, there were differences in the time course of effects.

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3 rd tone sandhi in Standard Chinese: A corpus approach

Journal of Chinese Linguistics

ABSTRACT

Trisyllabic Tone Sandhi in Tianjin Mandarin

Tianjin Mandarin is known for its complex tone sandhi patterns over bisyllabic constituents and t... more Tianjin Mandarin is known for its complex tone sandhi patterns over bisyllabic constituents and the conflicting directionality as well as the possible iterative application of sandhi rules over trisyllabic constituents. Previous studies on Tianjin tone sandhi, especially those on sandhi in trisyllabic sequences, have been mainly based on impressionistic descriptions. In this paper, we argue that tone sandhi in Tianjin Mandarin is much simpler than what the literature suggests. First, only three bisyllabic tonal combinations in Tianjin introduce sandhi changes: T1+T1, T4+T1, and T3+T3. Furthermore, tone sandhi in Tianjin Mandarin does not involve the change of one lexical tone into another. Second, in trisyllabic sequences, these bisyllabic sandhi rules do not apply consistently, as claimed in the literature. Specifically, T1+T1 and T4+T1 only introduce sandhi changes when they are right-aligned. Iterative sandhi application was only observed over T3+T3+T3 sequence where sandhi must ...

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Neutral Tone Realization in Tianjin Mandarin

This study examines the acoustic realization of neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin, which shows gre... more This study examines the acoustic realization of neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin, which shows great variability in the f 0 patterns. Previous studies, mainly with impressionistic data, have proposed that the neutral tone in Tianjin Mandarin has different underlying tonal targets depending on the tonal contexts, in particular the following tone. This presents a great challenge to the cross-dialectal understanding of neutral tone realization in the Mandarin family. With well-controlled laboratory speech, we show that the f 0 contours over the neutral tone syllable can be predicted from the neighboring lexical tones and much of the f 0 variation can be explained by factors that are known to affect lexical tone realization, namely, tone sandhi, focus, and tonal coarticulation.

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