The objective of this paper was to study the cognitive processes underlying cross-dialectal novel word borrowing and loanword establishment in a Standard-Chinese-to-Shanghainese (SC-SH) auditory... Show moreThe objective of this paper was to study the cognitive processes underlying cross-dialectal novel word borrowing and loanword establishment in a Standard-Chinese-to-Shanghainese (SC-SH) auditory lexical learning and borrowing experiment. To investigate these underlying cognitive processes, SC-SH bi-dialectals were compared with SC monolectals as well as bi-dialectals of SC and other Chinese dialects (OD) to investigate the influence of short-term and long-term linguistic experience. Both comprehension and production borrowings were tested. This study found that early and proficient bi-dialectism, even if it is not directly related to the recipient dialect of lexical borrowing, has a protective effect on the ability of cross-dialectal lexical borrowing in early adulthood. Bi-dialectals tend to add separate lexical representations for incidentally encountered dialectal variants, while monolectals tend to assimilate dialectal variants to standard forms. Bi-dialectals, but not monolectals, use etymologically related morphemes between the source and recipient dialects to create nonce-borrowing compounds. Dialectal variability facilitates lexical borrowing via enriching instead of increasing the short-term lexical experience of learners. The long-term bi-dialectal experience of individuals, as well as their short-term exposure to each specific loanword, may collectively shape the route of lexical evolution of co-evolving linguistic varieties. Show less
This research aims to study the dynamic interaction between education and poetic identity, with a reference to the Obscure poets that came to the fore in the late 1970s and the early 1980s in... Show moreThis research aims to study the dynamic interaction between education and poetic identity, with a reference to the Obscure poets that came to the fore in the late 1970s and the early 1980s in Mainland China. It has been a prevailing idea that “successful” schooling in China has killed creativity and produced many unimaginative minds.Michelle Yeh’s and Maghiel van Crevel’s localized redefinition of poetic identity and Ivan Illich’s idea of deschooling, enable us to take a different perspective. I adopt mixed methods and use various resources such as oeuvre and textbooks. It shows that school education, family education, peer education, and mentor education have impacted on the forming of Obscure Poetry, and there is a fascinating “complicity” in the relationship between Obscure Poetry and Political Lyricism. There is definitely a relation between educational background and poetic identity, and it is not just, or even primarily, a negative relation. Literary traditions pass from one generation to another through various kinds of education. The complexity of the relationship between education and creative writing has often been reduced, overlooked and misconstrued, but the role of education remains a core perspective for our understanding of literature and of cultural traditions at large. Show less
Researchers use different approaches when collecting and managing primary language materials during fieldwork. Yet it is important that this work is done in a transparent way, so that it can be... Show moreResearchers use different approaches when collecting and managing primary language materials during fieldwork. Yet it is important that this work is done in a transparent way, so that it can be used by other researchers, who might have other aims, as well as by the speaker community who might want to use or take note of the collected materials. In this article we use our research experience in language data collection in and around Indonesia in fieldwork projects of three kinds: descriptive fieldwork, linguistic surveys, and projects investigating language contact. Our aim is to provide an introductory and practical guide for students and professionals who are embarking on fieldwork in or around Indonesia. Describing practical methods of language data collection, processing, and management, our aim is to provide a guide for any research which involves the collection of language materials, including linguistic research, oral history or literature, and ethnography. Show less
Phonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many... Show morePhonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many ETEs, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. Using an auditory lexical decision experiment and Generalised Additive Modelling, the present study investigates how cross-linguistic tonal similarity interacts with language of operation and how the switching of language across blocks influences SC-JM bilinguals’ auditory lexical processing of ETEs. Bilinguals showed a language dominance effect, indicating that ETEs are specified with separated word-form representations. Compared with SC tonal monolinguals, bilinguals showed a discontinuous bilingual auditory lexical advantage, instead of a classical bilingual lexical disadvantage. The dynamic role of cross-linguistic tonal similarity in auditory word processing is discussed in light of the bilinguals’ attentional shift with the change of language mode at the pre-lexical and lexical stages. Show less
The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure... Show moreThe present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal pattern categories in an underresourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A two-stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi automatic way In the first stage, a program provides suggestions for the phonetician to decide the lexical tonal variants for the recordings of each word, based on the result of a functional k-means partitioning algorithm and tonal information from an available pronunciation dictionary of a related Chinese dialect, i.e. Standard Chinese. The second stage iterates a functional version of k-means partitioning with silhouette-based criteria to abstract an optimal number of tonal patterns from the whole corpus, which also allows the phoneticians to adjust the results of the automatic procedure in a controlled way and so redo partitioning for a subset of clusters.The procedure yielded eleven disyllabic tonal patterns for Jinan Mandarin, representing the tonal system used by contemporary Jinan Mandarin speakers from a wide range of age groups. The procedure used in this paper is different from previous linguistic descriptions which were based on more elderly speakers' pronunciations . This method incorporates phoneticians' linguistic knowledge and preliminary linguistic resources into the procedure of partitioning. It can improve the efficiency and objectivity in the investigation of lexical tonal pattern categories when building pronunciation dictionaries for underresourced languages. Show less
Both Standard Chinese (SC) high- and low-rising tones sound like the rising tone in Jinan Mandarin (JM) Chinese. Acoustically (Experiment 1), the JM rising tone overlaps with both SC rising tones,... Show moreBoth Standard Chinese (SC) high- and low-rising tones sound like the rising tone in Jinan Mandarin (JM) Chinese. Acoustically (Experiment 1), the JM rising tone overlaps with both SC rising tones, but more with the high-rising tone than with the low-rising tone. Perceptually (Experiment 2), the JM rising tone was more likely identified as the SC high-rising tone by SC monolinguals, as shown in Experiments 1 and 2. Experiment 3 examined the role of this two-to-one interlingual tonal mapping in bilingual lexical access. Final high-rising SC pseudo-words were more frequently and more quickly accepted as JM real words than final low-rising SC pseudo-words were. However, both high- and low-rising SC pseudo-words triggered equivalent facilitatory semantic priming on JM real-word targets. The results suggest that different tones are represented in the bilinguals’ mental lexicon in terms of fine-grained and sometimes overlapping acoustic specification. Lexical activation and semantic activation are partially independent. Show less
Tonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects; and they write translation equivalents... Show moreTonal bilinguals of two closely related Chinese dialects handle two tonal systems in their mind; their two vocabularies are from closely related dialects; and they write translation equivalents with common Chinese characters. Their unique language situation makes their mind special. This thesis investigates these tonal bilinguals’ lexical processing mechanism, studying how they produce and understand words. Their situation provides a valuable test case for a few important theories on bilingual lexical access. Bilingual lexical processing is flexible, influenced by the task and language mode. Moreover, compared with tonal monolinguals, these tonal bilinguals not only showed classical advantages in executive control, but sometimes even perform faster with lexical tasks. The structure of the bilingual lexicon can cause important differences in bilingual lexical processing and the corresponding functions of executive control. Show less
Wu, J.; Chen, Y.; V.J., van Heuven; Schiller, N.O. 2015
Pronunciation dictionaries are usually expensive and time-consuming to prepare for the computational modeling of human languages, especially when the target language is under-resourced. Northern... Show morePronunciation dictionaries are usually expensive and time-consuming to prepare for the computational modeling of human languages, especially when the target language is under-resourced. Northern Chinese dialects are often under-resourced but used by a significant number of speakers. They share the basic sound inventories with Standard Chinese (SC). Also, their words usually share the segmental realizations and logographic written forms with the SC translation equivalents. Hence the pronunciation dictionaries of northern Chinese dialects could be easily available if we were able to predict the tonal realizations of the dialect words from the tonal information of their SC counterparts. This paper applies statistical modeling to investigate the tonal aspect of the related words between a northern dialect, i.e. Jinan Mandarin (JM), and Standard Chinese (SC). Multi-linear regression models were built with between-word pitch distance of JM words as the dependent variable and the following were included as the predictors: SC tonal relations, between-dialect tonal identity, and individual backgrounds. The results showed that tonal relations in SC and between-dialect identity, as predictors featuring the relation between the JM and SC tonal systems, are significant and robust predictors of JM tonal realizations. The speakers’ sociolinguistic and cognitive backgrounds, together with the tonal merge and neutral tone information within JM, are important for the prediction of JM tonal realizations and affect the way that between-language predictors take effect. Show less
