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
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
