In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the processing of information about phonological consistency of Chinese phonograms during sentence reading. In Experiment 1, we adopted the error disruption paradigm in silent reading and found significant effects of phonological consistency and homophony in the foveal vision, but only in a late…

The study aimed to investigate the influence of 24 Hong Kong learners' first and second languages (L1 and L2 -- Cantonese and English, respectively) on the acquisition of Mandarin as a third language (L3) and to discuss how multilingual learners acquire L3 pronunciation features. The most frequent phonological features in L2 English and L3…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) learners of Mandarin Chinese use knowledge of phonological and lexical statistical regularities when acoustic information is insufficient for word recognition. A gating task was used to test intermediate L2 learners at two time points across a semester of classroom learning. Native Mandarin…

The 23rd Annual Graduate Student Conference of the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature (LLL) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was held on Saturday, April 20th, 2019. As in past years, this conference offered the students in the six departments across the college, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, Indo-Pacific…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

Discusses the simplification of forms ending in obstruents by native speakers of Mandarin, in particular two effects that are not obviously motivated by either the native- or the target-language grammars: a tendency to devoice final voiced obstruents and a tendency to maximize the number of bisyllabic forms in the output. (Author/JL)

A language typology based on common errors made in pronunciation of English by speakers of other languages is presented and discussed. The classification system was developed from the concept of interlanguage, the intermediate step between a language learner's native and target languages, and the notion that interference in learning a new language…

This selective bibliography is divided into 2 main sections. The first deals with Chinese-English contrastive studies and lists 8 books, or sections in books, and 19 journal articles. The second section deals with error analysis for Chinese speakers learning English and lists 4 articles. The entries range in date from 1948 to 1974 with the…