Hintat Cheung

Perception and production of Mandarin tones in prelingually deaf children with cochlear Implants

Objective: Mandarin is a lexical tone language in which four tones are crucial for determining lexical meanings. Acquisition of such a tone system may be challenging to prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants because, as recent studies have shown, cochlear implant devices are ineffective in encoding voice pitch information required for tone recognition. This study aimed to investigate Mandarin tone production and perception skills of children with cochlear implants. Design: Thirty prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants, ages 6;0 (yr;mo) to 12;6, participated. These children received their implants at an average age of 5;8, with a range from 2;3 to 10;3. The average length of their cochlear implant experience was 3;7, with a range from 1;7 to 6;5. Tasks of tone production and tone identification involved a pictorial protocol of 48 words containing the targeted tones in either monosyllabic or disyllabic forms. Results: The average scores for tone production was 53.09% (SD = 15.42), and for tone identification was 72.88% (SD = 19.68; chance level = 50%). Significant differences were found in the percentages across the production or identification of tone types or tone pairs. The children with exceptional performance in tone production tended to also perform well in tone identification. The childrens performance levels in tone identification and production were also discussed in relation to the factors of age at implantation and length of cochlear implant experience. Conclusions: The present results suggest that the majority of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants did not master Mandarin tone production. However, a small group of participants demonstrated nearly perfect skills of Mandarin tone production in addition to tone perception. Thus, it is necessary to consider factors other than the devices limitations to explain these high levels of performance in the perception and production of Mandarin lexical tones.

The effects of early English learning on auditory perception of English minimal pairs by Taiwan university students

Auditory perception of English minimal pairs was tested with or without noise background. Each subject was interviewed after the test to collect information regarding their early experience on learning English as a foreign language. This study was designed to examine the differential effects of learning English at three age-starting points and two learning durations. This study hopes to determine how childhood experience of English learning (which is not mandatory in public elementary schools) has affected the auditory competence of university students in distinguishing English minimal pairs. Results showed that age effects were salient only under condition of noise background. Without the interference of background noise, most subjects performed well enough to obliterate any potential differences.

Do they read aloud in a different way? A glimpse on the prosodic features of corpus‐based second language spoken English.

This study investigated the prosodic features of L2 spoken English. A set of ten recordings was extracted from an in‐progress learner corpus on an English proficiency test. Each recording consists of two passages as read aloud by a learner who had received a grade of 3, the median grade of the test, on a five‐point scale. A group of ten native English speakers was recruited to serve as controls. They were given the same test materials and their readings recorded under a test scenario similar to that of the L2 learners. The labeling followed the English ToBI convention. Preliminary results showed that in general, the L2 learners addressed more tones in their production. In terms of break indices, the L2 utterances were consistently segmented into a larger number of intonational units, as compared to those of the native speakers. In addition, silence was frequently employed in the L2 word‐level boundaries to facilitate enunciation, explained in that English has a more complex phonotactic structure than thei...

The error patterns of different nonword repetition tasks in 3‐year‐old Mandarin‐speaking children

This study investigates qualitatively and quantitatively 3‐year‐old Mandarin‐speaking children’s error patterns in two nonword repetition tasks which differ in their degrees of wordlikeness, i.e., the nonce word and the gap word sets. Their performances in the two tasks were transcribed and analyzed from two respects: (1) the rate of a specific unit retaining the target structure and (2) the cross comparison between linguistic units and error processes. Results showed that tones and syllable structures of the target forms were easier to retain than the contents. And even though children’s error patterns approximated the adults patterns in gap word repetition task, they had strategic difference in dealing the weight decay in memory: while the children used syllable and rhyme substitutions, the adults used syllable omissions. Our study has implied that children have the same processing mechanism with adults in learning novel words. However, their strategic difference may have an implication for language lea...