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This study examines the putative benefits of explicit phonetic instruction, high variability phonetic training, and their effects on adult nonnative speakers' Mandarin tone productions. Monolingual first language (L1) English speakers (n = 80), intermediate second language (L2) Mandarin learners (n = 40), and L1 Mandarin speakers (n = 40) took part in a multiday Mandarin-like artificial language learning task. Participants were asked to repeat a syllable--tone combination immediately after hearing it. Half of all participants were exposed to speech from 1 talker (low variability) while the other half heard speech from 4 talkers (high variability). Half of the L1 English participants were given daily explicit instruction on Mandarin tone contours, while the other half were not. Tone accuracy was measured by L1 Mandarin raters (n = 104) who classified productions according to their perceived tonal category. Explicit instruction of tone contours facilitated L1 English participants' production of rising and falling tone contours. High variability input alone had no main effect on participants' productions but interacted with explicit instruction to improve participants' productions of high-level tone contours. These results motivate an L2 tone production training approach that consists of explicit tone instruction followed by gradual exposure to more variable speech.

While the sociolinguistic variable is often deemed the carrier of social meaning, recent work reveals that the strength of social meaning can interact with linguistic environments. This study provides additional evidence that the same sets of variants can index drastically different social meanings across linguistic environments. Specifically, we present two cases of linguistic stylization in Taiwanese singer Jay Chou's performance in different genres: the 'Chinese Flavor' ballad and hip hop. Focusing on two socially salient variables in Mandarin—rhotacization and retroflex sibilants—we argue that while in both cases, Chou adopts variants associated with standard and mainland Mandarin, they index different social meanings. The conforming linguistic use in the 'Chinese Flavor' ballad indexes a sense of tradition, whereas the hypercorrected forms in the hip-hop song construct an unconventional stance. The study also addresses the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic stylizations and calls for more research on the multimodal construction of style. (Social meaning, linguistic constraint, multimodal, high performance, Mandarin) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the relationship between traditional and simplified characters of Chinese to determine the systematic ways in which traditional forms are simplified. The one thousand most frequently used characters and their simplified forms, if any, are listed in order of frequency of use. (DJD)

An obituary for sinologist and professor emeritus of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia Edwin G. Pulleyblank is presented.

Wuxi is a Northern Wu dialect of Chinese spoken in Wuxi district, the administrative center of which is Wuxi City, located about thirty miles northwest of Suzhou, and another fifty miles further from Shanghai. The Wuxi dialect exhibits some interesting behaviour with respect to its tone sandhi patterning that has not been reported in the literature. [1] The dialect has two strategies for tone sandhi patterning — pattern extension and pattern substitution — both of which involve the first syllable as “dominant”, as determining the tone patterning in the sandhi span (Yue-Hashimoto 1980). Pattern extension simply involves taking the tone melody that was on the first syllable and extending that pattern onto the entire tone sandhi span. Pattern substitution requires one additional step before the tone-spreading; namely, the replacement of the tone melody on the first syllable with a new melody before its spread onto the tone sandhi domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the traditional analysis of the tones in Chinese, a distinction is made between “basic tones” and “sandhi tones”. The former occurs on the citation tones of monosyllabic words and the latter on syllables that had undergone tone sandhi changes. Typically, tone sandhi positions are sites where tone neutralization had taken place, so that in a given dialect, the number of tones in citation context exceed those in sandhi context. As a result, the tones on citation forms are considered the “basic” tones. This paper challenges the traditional treatment of citation tones as the “basic” ones. In some dialects, there is an increase in tonal contrasts in tone sandhi environment. In such cases, the tone sandhi environment has preserved contrasts lost in citation context. Further complications in some dialects are presented here, providing the basis for making a three-way distinction among: (1) citation tone, (2) sandhi tone, and (3) basic (or underlying) tone. The basic, or underlying, tone may be coterminous with either the citation tone or the sandhi tone, or it may have its own, separate tonal value. Phonological contrasts surfacing in tone sandhi environments are not restricted to cases involving tones. Two examples from Fuzhou Chinese are included in this paper to demonstrate that tone sandhi positions may also preserve segmental contrasts that are totally or partially neutralized in citation context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]