This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

Adult second language learners often show considerable individual variability in the ease with which lexical tones are learned. It is known that factors pertaining to a learner's first language (L1; such as L1 tonal status or L1 tone type) as well as extralinguistic factors (such as musical experience and working memory) modulate tone learning…

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate whether human auditory frequency tuning can be influenced by tonal language experience. Method: Perceptual tuning measured via psychophysical tuning curves and cochlear tuning derived via stimulus-frequency otoacoustic emission suppression tuning curves in 14 native speakers of a tonal language…

This study examined the importance of syllable position, duration, and tone/pitch for the assignment of stress in Chinese hums. Twenty native Mandarin speakers and 20 native English speakers were asked to assign primary stress to two-syllable Chinese hums. The importance of acoustic cues for stress assignment was also evaluated. Our findings…

The current study examined the phonolexical processing of Mandarin segments and tones by English speakers at different Mandarin proficiency levels. Eleven English speakers naive to Mandarin, 15 intermediate and 9 advanced second language (L2) learners participated in a word-learning experiment. After learning the sound and meaning of 16 Mandarin…

Purpose: This research compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (English and Japanese) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Mandarin tones (Tones 1 vs. 2 [T1-T2], Tones 1 vs. 3 [T1-T3], Tones 1 vs. 4 [T1-T4], Tones 2 vs. 3 [T2-T3], Tones 2 vs. 4 [T2-T4], Tones 3 vs. 4 [T3-T4]) on account of their L1. Method:…

Mandarin speakers tend to adapt intervocalic nasals as either an onset of the following syllable (e.g. Bruno [right arrow] "bù.lu.nuò"), as a nasal geminate (e.g. Daniel [right arrow] "dan.ní.er"), or as one of the above forms (e.g. Tiffany [right arrow] "dì.fú.ní" or "dì.fen.ní"). Huang and Lin (2013, 2016)…

Purpose: This study aimed to examine whether abstract knowledge of word-level linguistic prosody is independent of or integrated with phonetic knowledge. Method: Event-related potential (ERP) responses were measured from 18 adult listeners while they listened to native and nonnative word-level prosody in speech and in nonspeech. The prosodic…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

Languages generally use musical pitch variation of the voice as part of their sound systems (Maddieson, 2011)--pitch variations that can be somewhat reminiscent of music. Music ability and/or training may influence language processing (e.g., Bidelman et al., 2011; Delogue et al., 2010). In particular, studies have concluded that there may be a…

The present study investigated first language (L1) and second language (L2) Chinese categorization of tones and segments and use of tones and segments in lexical access. Previous research has shown that English listeners rely more on pitch height than pitch direction when perceiving lexical tones; however, it remains unclear if this superior use…