Purpose: This study investigated the efficacy of ultrasound biofeedback compared to a traditional acoustic input-only method in the second-language (L2) production training of English tense-lax vowel ...contrasts (/i-near-close near-front unrounded vowel/ and /e-open-mid front unrounded vowel/). The relationship between the degrees of production and perception learning was also examined to explore a potential L2 production-perception link. Method: Using a pretest/training/posttest paradigm, two groups of native Mandarin speakers received three sessions of training, one with ultrasound and one with audio only. Perception performance was measured by accuracy in AX discrimination. Production performance was measured in terms of accuracy in repetition production and Euclidean distance between contrasting vowels. Results: Both groups showed significant improvements in posttest production and perception tasks. Additionally, the training benefits were retained 6 weeks after training. The two groups, however, did not differ significantly in training gains; nor was there a significant correlation between training-induced changes in perception and production performance. Conclusions: The results indicate that ultrasound feedback is similarly effective as the audio-only training in improving the L2 production of English tense-lax contrasts and the benefits transferred to perception. The lack of correlation between production and perception gains suggests that the two modalities need to be separately trained to achieve desired L2 learning outcomes.
Given the increasing emphasis of communicative competence in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and the lack of validation research on speaking assessments for adolescent EFL learners, in ...the current study we examined the validity of the TOEFL Junior® speaking test, a relatively new speaking assessment developed by Educational Testing Service. We utilized Messick’s integrative view of construct validity (1996) and Kane’s interpretation argument framework (Kane, 2013), and focused on two sources of validity evidence: internal structure and external relations to other variables (AERA, APA, and NCME, 2014). We used a cross-sectional design with 252 seventh-to-ninth graders in Taiwan, which aligns with the spectrum of the TOEFL Junior®’s target age group. All adolescent participants took the TOEFL Junior® speaking test and two researcher-developed speaking tests. They also completed a survey reporting their history of English learning experiences from kindergarten to present and evaluating their own English language skills. Adolescent participants’ teachers provided evaluations of participants’ English language skills. Results from correlational tests and confirmatory factor analysis showed robust evidence for the test’s internal structure. Correlation and multiple regression models also demonstrated strong positive relationships between TOEFL Junior® test scores and external variables, providing evidence for TOEFL Junior®’s construct validity.
Relatively little research has been devoted to examining the predictors of early foreign language learning outcomes despite the global trend of early foreign language instruction. The current study ...focused on two contextual predictors, learners' socio-economic status (SES) and input, both of which have been demonstrated to play a prominent role in first language development and second language (L2) development in an immersion context. The current study also investigated the relationship between SES, input and L2 learning outcomes and the mechanism through which SES influences L2 outcomes. Participants included 97 tenth and eleventh grade students from Taipei, Taiwan. All participants completed a story-telling task and a survey providing information about their language input in middle and high school. Their parents also filled out a survey providing information about their family profile and learner participants' input in preschool/kindergarten and elementary school. Results from the study showed that both SES and input played a role in adolescent learners’ speech production outcomes, but the effects differed by speech dimensions (i.e., accuracy, fluency, and complexity). Although both SES and input predicted L2 speech production outcomes, the two variables were closely related to each other, and the effect of SES was indirect and mediated by input.
While segmental contrasts are under prosodically strong conditions, acoustic properties encoding the contrastive features are generally exaggerated, which gives rise to phonological enhancement. One ...exception that previous research found for such prosodic effects is on consonantal place of articulation (Cole, Kim, Choi, & Hasegawa-Johnson, 2007; Silbert & de Jong, 2008). Whether this is an issue of the nature of the segments under study, or a language-specific phenomenon is worth further investigation. This paper builds on Chuang and Fon's (2010) study of Taiwan Mandarin alveolar and retroflex sibilants and extends the examination to another dialect of Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin. With a series of map tasks to elicit natural yet well-controlled data, this study asks whether contrastive focus realizations of the alveolar–retroflex contrast vary across vowel contexts between the two dialects. Results show that, consistent with Silbert and de Jong's finding for place distinction in English fricatives, focal prominence may result in the exaggeration of non-contrastive dimensions (i.e., longer syllable and frication duration as well as higher frication amplitude) without enhancing feature-defining properties (i.e., a greater acoustic distance between alveolar and retroflex sibilants). It is suggested that the place feature, particularly in coronal sibilants, is generally less subject to cue-enhancing hyperarticulation, regardless of languages and dialects.
•We examine focus effects on sibilant place contrasts in two dialects of Mandarin.•Map tasks are devised to elicit alveolar and retroflex productions.•Focal prominence increases frication duration and amplitude.•Focal prominence does not result in enhanced spectral distance.•We confirm the limitation of focus effects on acoustic cues marking place contrasts.
Mandarin in Taiwan is notably different from other variants of Mandarin in terms of lexical use and accents. However, from an investment perspective, it remains debated whether the general-purpose ...Mandarin speech recognition (MSR) systems are sufficient for supporting human-computer interaction in Taiwan. In addressing this question, we established the Formosa (an ancient name of Taiwan given by the Portuguese) Speech in the Wild (FSW) (Liao
2018
) project to (1) collect large-scale Taiwanese Mandarin speech to boost Taiwanese-specific MSR technique development, and (2) host a Formosa Speech Recognition (FSR) challenge (Liao
2018
) to promote the corpus as well as to evaluate the performance of the available Taiwanese-specific MSR systems. The FSW project has focused on transcribing spontaneous Taiwanese Mandarin speech selected from real-life, multi-genre broadcast radio speech provided by Taiwan’s National Education Radio (
2018
). We plan to publicly release about 3000 hours of speech data at the end of 2019. FSR-2018 (Liao
2018
) was the culmination of FSW’s events in the year 2018, which featured a Taiwanese broadcast Mandarin speech recognition evaluation campaign using released corpora. The challenge was also an official activity (Liao
2018
) of the 11
t
h
International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP)
22
. At the end of 2018, the first 4 volumes of the FSW Corpus, NER-Trs-Vol1∼4, a total of 610.2 hours of speech data, were released to support two events, Formosa Grand Challenge, Talk to AI (FGC) (Ministry of Science And Technology Taiwan
2018
) (Dec. 2017 ∼ Mar. 2019) and FSR-2018 challenge (Liao
2018
) (June 2018 ∼ Nov. 2018), which had 147 and 27 participating teams respectively. For FSR-2018, 30 recognition results on the final-test set were submitted by 16 teams. The evaluation results revealed that the best Taiwanese-specific MSR system achieved an 8.1% Chinese character error rate (CER). As reference, the performances of iFlyTek’s (ISCSLP
2018
) and Google’s (
2018
) commercial MSR systems which were not optimized for this task were 18.8% and 20.6% CERs, respectively. Taken together, we argued that a Taiwanese-specific MSR system is necessary for improving the performance of Taiwanese Mandarin speech-enabled human-computer interaction.
The aim of the current study is twofold: to examine the effects of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term second language (L2) outcomes in a minority/foreign language context; and to understand ...the interaction between input and other potential predictors of L2 outcomes, specifically environmental variables, learners’ motivation and language learning aptitude. Participants included 97 Mandarin–English bilingual adolescents in Taiwan who learned English as an L2 between the ages of two to eleven. All participants completed a listening comprehension and a story-telling task in English and two standardized language learning aptitude tests. Participants and their parents filled out a detailed questionnaire providing information about family demographics and in-class and out-of-class L2 input. Correlation and multivariate regression analyses revealed that input played an important role in long-term L2 listening comprehension outcome, but not in speech production outcomes. The results also showed that environmental variables and language learning aptitude significantly predicted long-term L2 listening comprehension and speech production outcomes. Finally, out-of-class L2 input outweighed instructional input and current input outweighed early input. Since most previous research on the role of input in long-term L2 outcomes was conducted in a majority/societal language context, the present study contributes to the topic by specifying the effect of input in L2 acquisition in a minority/foreign language context.
Socioperceptual research has shown that speech perception can be biased by the perceived dialect of a speaker. While these studies have focused on vowels, the current study investigates whether ...fricative perception exhibits similar dialect effects. The Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast, often used for distinguishing between Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin, was the manipulated feature. When presented with a Beijing or Taiwan label, Beijing and Taiwanese listeners identified various tokens along the /ʂa-sa/ and /ʂu-su/ continua. The results showed no evidence that the dialect labels affected listeners’ responses. The roles of dialect stereotypes and attitudes were also examined, but none of these variables influenced the identification results. The absence of dialect labeling effects in fricative perception may be due to the lack of control of the participants’ alveolar and retroflex production, and to the limited dialect-distinguishing cues contained in Mandarin fricatives alone. In light of other research which also reported limited evidence for social information on perception, it is suggested that future research should investigate under what circumstances (e.g., control of listener variables, choice of stimuli) such dialect labeling effects in consonant perception might be expected.
Abstract This study compared dynamic formant trajectories and corresponding ultrasound tongue data of the diphthong /ou/ in Taiwan Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin speakers. Results of the Generalized ...Additive Mixed Models (GAMM) analyses showed that both groups of speakers produced a clearly diphthongal /ou/, which contrasts with previous auditory-based accounts that /ou/ in Taiwan Mandarin may be monophthongal. The two dialects, however, had rather different phonetic realizations: Taiwan Mandarin had a significantly lower realization for the nucleus of /ou/ than its Beijing counterpart; Taiwan Mandarin also had a significantly more fronted realization for the offglide than Beijing Mandarin. The articulatory patterns mostly corresponded to the acoustic results, in that while tongue dorsum raising was found for all speakers in this study, an additional tongue dorsum fronting gesture was observed for the majority of the Taiwan Mandarin speakers. Together, the results suggest that the less studied dialectal variation in Mandarin vowels may be a promising line of investigation, particularly with parallel acoustic and articulatory data collection.
社會感知文獻指出，聽者對於說話者方言背景的主觀認定，會造成聽者對相同語音有不同的感知。有鑒於這些研究僅只探討母音，本研究用台灣華語和北京普通話裡平捲音對比，來探討摩擦音感知是否也存在類似的感知調適現象。實驗中透過方言標籤（北京或台灣）的操弄，進行對聽者/ʂa-sa/和/ʂu-su/的語音連續體的辨識測驗。結果顯示，方言標籤的操弄並未影響聽者的語音辨識決定。方言既定印象和方言態度也未對辨識結果造成顯著影響。方言標籤未對中文摩擦音感知造成影響，可能跟本研究未控制聽者的平捲音產成能力有關，也有可能是中文摩擦音訊號裡欠缺辨別方言的資訊。有鑒於先前研究亦提出社會索引訊息未總是能造成語音感知調適，本研究建議未來相關研究需探討語音感知調適是否存在先決條件（如：受試者相關變因之控制、刺激材料類別之選擇）, Socioperceptual research has shown that speech perception can be biased by the perceived dialect of a speaker. While these studies have focused on vowels, the current study investigates whether fricative perception exhibits similar dialect effects. The Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast, often used for distinguishing between Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin, was the manipulated feature. When presented with a Beijing or Taiwan label, Beijing and Taiwanese listeners identified various tokens along the /ʂa-sa/ and /ʂu-su/ continua. The results showed no evidence that the dialect labels affected listeners’ responses. The roles of dialect stereotypes and attitudes were also examined, but none of these variables influenced the identification results. The absence of dialect labeling effects in fricative perception may be due to the lack of control of the participants’ alveolar and retroflex production, and to the limited dialect-distinguishing cues contained in Mandarin fricatives alone. In light of other research which also reported limited evidence for social information on perception, it is suggested that future research should investigate under what circumstances (e.g., control of listener variables, choice of stimuli) such dialect labeling effects in consonant perception might be expected.
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