65 results on '"Nan Xu Rattanasone"'
Search Results
2. Effects of maternal depression on maternal responsiveness and infants’ expressive language abilities
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Ruth Brookman, Marina Kalashnikova, Penny Levickis, Janet Conti, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Kerry-Ann Grant, Katherine Demuth, and Denis Burnham
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Medicine ,Science - Abstract
High levels of maternal responsiveness are associated with healthy cognitive and emotional development in infants. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact individual mothers’ responsiveness levels and infants’ expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads (N = 48) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal responsiveness (when infants were 9- and 12-months), and maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on infant vocabulary size at 18-months. Global maternal responsiveness ratings were stronger predictors of infants’ vocabulary size than levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. However, depression levels moderated the effect of maternal responsiveness on vocabulary size. These results highlight the importance of screening for maternal responsiveness–in addition to depression–to identify infants who may be at developmental risk. Also, mothers with elevated depression need support to first reduce their symptoms so that improvements in their responsiveness have the potential to be protective for their infant’s language acquisition.
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- 2023
3. Bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers’ spoken narrative skills and contributing factors: A remote online story-retell study
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Jingdan Yang, Jae-Hyun Kim, Outi Tuomainen, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
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narrative skills ,Mandarin-English bilinguals ,preschoolers ,macrostructure ,microstructure ,Psychology ,BF1-990 - Abstract
This study examined the spoken narrative skills of a group of bilingual Mandarin–English speaking 3–6-year-olds (N = 25) in Australia, using a remote online story-retell task. Bilingual preschoolers are an understudied population, especially those who are speaking typologically distinct languages such as Mandarin and English which have fewer structural overlaps compared to language pairs that are typologically closer, reducing cross-linguistic positive transfer. We examined these preschoolers’ spoken narrative skills as measured by macrostructures (the global organization of a story) and microstructures (linguistic structures, e.g., total number of utterances, nouns, verbs, phrases, and modifiers) across and within each language, and how various factors such as age and language experiences contribute to individual variability. The results indicate that our bilingual preschoolers acquired spoken narrative skills similarly across their two languages, i.e., showing similar patterns of productivity for macrostructure and microstructure elements in both of their two languages. While chronological age was positively correlated with macrostructures in both languages (showing developmental effects), there were no significant correlations between measures of language experiences and the measures of spoken narrative skills (no effects for language input/output). The findings suggest that although these preschoolers acquire two typologically diverse languages in different learning environments, Mandarin at home with highly educated parents, and English at preschool, they displayed similar levels of oral narrative skills as far as these macro−/micro-structure measures are concerned. This study provides further evidence for the feasibility of remote online assessment of preschoolers’ narrative skills.
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- 2022
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4. Maternal Depression Affects Infants’ Lexical Processing Abilities in the Second Year of Life
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Ruth Brookman, Marina Kalashnikova, Janet Conti, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Kerry-Ann Grant, Katherine Demuth, and Denis Burnham
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language development ,lexical processing ,vocabulary ,postnatal ,maternal depression ,maternal anxiety ,Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry ,RC321-571 - Abstract
Maternal depression and anxiety have been proposed to increase the risk of adverse outcomes of language development in the early years of life. This study investigated the effects of maternal depression and anxiety on language development using two approaches: (i) a categorical approach that compared lexical abilities in two groups of children, a risk group (mothers with clinical-level symptomatology) and a control non-risk group, and (ii) a continuous approach that assessed the relation between individual mothers’ clinical and subclinical symptomatology and their infants’ lexical abilities. Infants’ lexical abilities were assessed at 18 months of age using an objective lexical processing measure and a parental report of expressive vocabulary. Infants in the risk group exhibited lower lexical processing abilities compared to controls, and maternal depression scores were negatively correlated to infants’ lexical processing and vocabulary measures. Furthermore, maternal depression (not anxiety) explained the variance in infants’ individual lexical processing performance above the variance explained by their individual expressive vocabulary size. These results suggest that significant differences are emerging in 18-month-old infants’ lexical processing abilities, and this appears to be related, in part, to their mothers’ depression and anxiety symptomatology during the postnatal period.
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- 2020
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5. Five-Year-olds' Acoustic Realization of Mandarin Tone Sandhi and Lexical Tones in Context Are Not Yet Fully Adult-Like
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ping Tang, Ivan Yuen, Liqun Gao, and Katherine Demuth
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lexical tone acquisition ,tone sandhi ,mandarin ,acoustic analysis ,pre-schoolers ,Psychology ,BF1-990 - Abstract
Large numbers of children around the world are learning tone languages, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of children's early tone productions. Even more scarce are acquisition studies on tone sandhi, a tone change phenomenon which alters the surface realization of lexical tones. Two studies using perceptual coding report the emergence of lexical tone and tone sandhi at around 2 years (Li and Thompson, 1977; Hua and Dodd, 2000). However, the only acoustic study available shows that 3-year-olds are not yet adult-like in their lexical tone productions (Wong, 2012). This raises questions about when children's productions become acoustically adult-like and how their tone productions differ from those of adults. These questions were addressed in the current study which compared Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers' (3–5-year-olds) tone productions to that of adults. A picture naming task was used with disyllabic real words familiar to pre-schoolers. Overall children produced appropriate tone contours for all tones, i.e., level for tone 1, rising for tones 2, 3 and full sandhi, falling for tone 4 and half sandhi. However, children's productions were not adult-like for tones 3, 4, and the sandhi forms, in terms of coordinating pitch range, slope and curvature, with little evidence of development across ages. These results suggest a protracted process in achieving adult-like acoustic realization of both lexical and sandhi tones.
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- 2018
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6. The iPad as a Research Tool for the Understanding of English Plurals by English, Chinese and Other L1 Speaking 3- and 4-year-olds.
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Benjamin Davies, Tamara Schembri, Fabia Andronos, and Katherine Demuth
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Early Child Second Language learning1 ,Plural Inflectional Morphology2 ,Chinese-speaking children3 ,iPads4 ,Preschools5. ,Psychology ,BF1-990 - Abstract
Learning about what young children with limited spoken language know about the grammar of their language is extremely challenging. Researchers have traditionally used looking behavior as a measure of language processing and to infer what overt choices children might make. However, these methods are expensive to setup, require specialized training, are time intensive for data analysis and can have considerable dropout rates. For these reasons, we have developed a forced choice task delivered on an iPad based on our eye-tracking studies with English monolinguals (Davies et al., accepted; Davies et al., under review). Using the iPad we investigated 3- and 4-year-olds’ understanding of the English plural in preschool centers. The primary aim of the study was to provide evidence for the usefulness of the iPad as a language research tool. We evaluated the usefulness of the iPad with second language (L2) learning children who have limited L2 language skills. Studies with school aged Chinese-speaking children show below native performance on English inflectional morphology despite 5-6 years of immersion (Jia, 2003; Jia & Fuse, 2007; Paradis et al., 2016). However, it is unclear whether this is specific only to children who speak Chinese as their first language (L1) or if younger preschoolers will also show similar challenges. We tested three groups of preschoolers with different L1s (English, Chinese, and Other languages). L1 Chinese children’s performance was below both English monolinguals and children speaking Other L1 languages, providing evidence that English inflections are specifically challenging for Chinese-speaking children. The results provide further evidence to support previous eye-tracking findings with monolinguals and studies with older bilinguals. The study provides evidence for the usefulness of iPads as research tool for studying language acquisition. Implications for future application of the iPad as a teaching and intervention tool, and limitations for the method, are discussed.
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- 2016
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7. Mandarin-speaking Children With Cochlear Implants Face Challenges in Using F0 Expansion to Express Contrastive Focus.
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Ping Tang, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Demuth, Katherine, Liyan Wang, and Yuen, Ivan
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- 2024
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8. Differential effects of attachment security on visual fixation to facial expressions of emotion in 14-month-old infants: an eye-tracking study.
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Nan Xu Rattanasone and Jae-Hyun Kim
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FACIAL expression & emotions (Psychology) ,INFANTS ,EYE tracking ,FACIAL expression ,SELF-expression ,HABITUATION (Neuropsychology) ,VALENCE fluctuations ,NEW trials - Abstract
Introduction: Models of attachment and information processing suggest that the attention infants allocate to social information might occur in a schemadriven processing manner according to their attachment pattern. A major source of social information for infants consists of facial expressions of emotion. We tested for differences in attention to facial expressions and emotional discrimination between infants classified as securely attached (B), insecureavoidant (A), and insecure-resistant (C). Methods: Sixty-one 14-month-old infants participated in the Strange Situation Procedure and an experimental task of Visual Habituation and Visual Paired- Comparison Task (VPC). In the Habituation phase, a Low-Arousal Happy face (habituation face) was presented followed by a VPC task of 6 trials composed of two contrasting emotional faces always involving the same actress: the one used in habituation (trial old face) and a new one (trial new face) portraying changes in valence (Low-Arousal Angry face), arousal (High-Arousal Happy face), or valence + arousal (High-Arousal Angry face). Measures of fixation time (FT) and number of fixations (FC) were obtained for the habituation face, the trial old face, the trial new face, and the difference between the trial old face and the trial new face using an eye-tracking system. Results: We found a higher FT and FC for the trial new face when compared with the trial old face, regardless of the emotional condition (valence, arousal, valence + arousal contrasts), suggesting that 14-month-old infants were able to discriminate different emotional faces. However, this effect differed according to attachment pattern: resistant-attached infants (C) had significantly higher FT and FC for the new face than patterns B and A, indicating they may remain hypervigilant toward emotional change. On the contrary, avoidant infants (A) revealed significantly longer looking times to the trial old face, suggesting overall avoidance of novel expressions and thus less sensitivity to emotional change. Discussion: Overall, these findings corroborate that attachment is associated with infants' social information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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- 2024
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9. The perception of Mandarin tones by learners from heritage and non-heritage backgrounds.
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Kimiko Tsukada, Hui Ling Xu, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
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- 2014
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10. Produced, but not ‘productive’: Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers’ challenges acquiring L2 English plural morphology
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Katherine Demuth and Nan Xu Rattanasone
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Linguistics and Language ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,General Psychology ,Language and Linguistics - Abstract
It is often assumed that pre-schoolers learn a second language (L2) with ease, even for structures that are absent in their L1, such as Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers learning L2 English grammatical inflections (e.g., ducks, horses). However, while the results from Study 1 showed that such learners can imitate plural words (age = 3;5, N = 20), Studies 2 and 3 showed that they cannot yet generate or comprehend plural morphology (Study 2: age = 4;8, N = 20; Study 3: age = 4;1, N = 20), raising questions about when this is achieved. These findings have important implications for school readiness, as well as for identifying those at risk of developmental language disorders.
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- 2022
11. The acoustic realization of contrastive focus by 6-year-old Australian English-speaking children
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Ivan Yuen, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Elaine Schmidt, Rebecca Holt, and Katherine Demuth
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Acoustics and Ultrasonics ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) - Abstract
Children as young as five have some ability to produce contrastive focus [Wells et al. (2004) J. Child Lang. 31, 749–778]. However, adult listeners' ability to identify the location of contrastive focus depends on whether the speech came from a 4-, 7-, or 11-year-old [Patel and Brayton (2009) J. Speech. Lang. Hear. Res. 52, 790–801]. Recent acoustic studies have also reported the use of F0 vs duration in contrastive focus productions by American English–speaking 2-year-olds [Thorson and Morgan (2021) J. Child Lang. 48, 541–568] and 4-year-olds [Wonnacott and Watson (2008) Cognition 107, 1093–1101], respectively. This study, therefore, evaluated the extent to which older 6-year-olds, with more language experience, used F0 and/or duration when producing contrastive focus, and compared this to adult speech. Monosyllabic and disyllabic adjective + noun targets (e.g., green ball) in utterance medial and final position were elicited from 20 Australian English–speaking 6-year-olds and 14 adults in adjective focus and noun focus conditions. Although both adults and children used high F0, only adults consistently used word and stressed syllable duration as well. This suggests that children may master the different acoustic cues to contrastive focus at different stages of development, with late cue integration.
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- 2022
12. The acquisition of contrastive focus during online sentence-comprehension by children learning mandarin Chinese
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, and Ping Tang
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Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Life-span and Life-course Studies ,Demography - Abstract
Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a
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- 2022
13. Jellybeans… or Jelly, Beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, and Rebecca Holt
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Comprehension ,Linguistics and Language ,Phrase ,Stress (linguistics) ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Child language acquisition ,Prosody ,Psychology ,General Psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to identify noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.
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- 2021
14. Tone and vowel enhancement in Cantonese infant-directed speech at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of age.
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Denis Burnham, and Ronan G. Reilly
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- 2013
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15. Five-year-olds produce prosodic cues to distinguish compounds from lists in Australian English
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Gretel Macdonald, Katherine Demuth, Elaine Schmidt, Ivan Yuen, Rebecca Holt, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
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Adult ,Male ,Linguistics and Language ,Speech production ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Language Development ,Speech Acoustics ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Young Adult ,030507 speech-language pathology & audiology ,03 medical and health sciences ,Australian English ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Child ,Prosody ,General Psychology ,05 social sciences ,Age Factors ,Australia ,language.human_language ,Focus (linguistics) ,Duration (music) ,Child, Preschool ,Speech Perception ,language ,Female ,Cues ,0305 other medical science ,Psychology ,Child Language ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Although previous research has indicated that five-year-olds can use acoustic cues to disambiguate compounds (N1 + N2) from lists (N1, N2) (e.g., ‘ice-cream’ vs. ‘ice, cream’) (Yoshida & Katz, 2004, 2006), their productions are not yet fully adult-like (Wells, Peppé & Goulandris, 2004). The goal of this study was to examine this issue in Australian English-speaking children, with a focus on their use of F0, word duration, and pauses. Twenty-four five-year-olds and 20 adults participated in an elicited production experiment. Like adults, children produced distinct F0 patterns for the two structures. They also used longer word durations and more pauses in lists compared to compounds, indicating the presence of a boundary in lists. However, unlike adults, they also inappropriately inserted more pauses within the compound, suggesting the presence of a boundary in compounds as well. The implications for understanding children's developing knowledge of how to map acoustic cues to prosodic structures are discussed.
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- 2020
16. The Acquisition of Productive Plural Morphology by Children With Hearing Loss
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Katherine Demuth, Benjamin Davies, Aleisha Davis, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
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Male ,Auditory perception ,Linguistics and Language ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Morphology (linguistics) ,Hearing loss ,Audiology ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,03 medical and health sciences ,Speech and Hearing ,Hearing Aids ,0302 clinical medicine ,Phonetics ,Morpheme ,Task Performance and Analysis ,medicine ,Humans ,Language Development Disorders ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Allomorph ,Child ,Hearing Loss ,030223 otorhinolaryngology ,Plural ,05 social sciences ,Comprehension ,Cochlear Implants ,Case-Control Studies ,Child, Preschool ,Speech Perception ,Female ,Syllabic verse ,medicine.symptom ,Psychology ,Child Language - Abstract
Purpose Normal-hearing (NH) children acquire plural morphemes at different rates, with the segmental allomorphs /–s, –z/ (e.g., cat-s ) being acquired before the syllabic allomorph /–əz/ (e.g., bus-es ). Children with hearing loss (HL) have been reported to show delays in the production of plural morphology, raising the possibility that this might be due to challenges acquiring different types of lexical/morphological representations. This study therefore examined the comprehension of plural morphology by 3- to 7-year-olds with HL and compared this with performance by their NH peers. We also investigated comprehension as a function of wearing hearing aids (HAs) versus cochlear implants (CIs). Method Participants included 129 NH children aged 3–5 years and 25 children with HL aged 3–7 years (13 with HAs, 12 with CIs). All participated in a novel word two-alternative forced-choice task presented on an iPad. The task tested comprehension of the segmental (e.g., teps, mubz ) and syllabic (e.g., kosses ) plural, as well as their singular counterparts (e.g., tep, mub, koss ). Results While the children with NH were above chance for all conditions, those with HL performed at chance. As a group, the performance of the children with HL did not improve with age. However, results suggest possible differences between children with HAs and those with CIs, where those with HAs appeared to be in the process of developing representations of consonant–vowel–consonant singulars. Conclusions Results suggest that preschoolers with HL do not yet have a robust representation of plural morphology for words they have not heard before. However, those with HAs are beginning to access the singular/plural system as they get older.
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- 2020
17. Acquiring the Last Plural: Morphophonological Effects on the Comprehension of /-əz
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Benjamin Davies, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Katherine Demuth
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Auditory perception ,Linguistics and Language ,05 social sciences ,Phonology ,Language acquisition ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,Education ,Comprehension ,Morpheme ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Syllabic verse ,Allomorph ,Psychology ,050104 developmental & child psychology ,Plural - Abstract
English-speaking children use plural morphology from around the age of 2, yet often omit the syllabic plural allomorph /-əz/ until age 5 (e.g., bus(es)). It is not clear if this protracted acquisit...
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- 2020
18. Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject–verb agreement during sentence processing
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Benjamin Davies
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Adult ,Male ,Linguistics and Language ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Verb ,Choice Behavior ,Language Development ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Sentence processing ,Morpheme ,Noun ,Subject (grammar) ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,General Psychology ,Language ,media_common ,Plural ,Psycholinguistics ,05 social sciences ,Australia ,Agreement ,Linguistics ,Semantics ,Child, Preschool ,Female ,Comprehension ,Psychology ,Sentence ,050104 developmental & child psychology - Abstract
Subject–verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners’ sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.
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- 2019
19. Bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers' spoken narrative skills and contributing factors: A remote online story-retell study
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Jingdan Yang, Jae-Hyun Kim, Outi Tuomainen, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG)
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150 Psychologie ,macrostructure ,Mandarin-English bilinguals ,microstructure ,narrative skills ,preschoolers ,General Psychology - Abstract
This study examined the spoken narrative skills of a group of bilingual Mandarin–English speaking 3–6-year-olds (N = 25) in Australia, using a remote online story-retell task. Bilingual preschoolers are an understudied population, especially those who are speaking typologically distinct languages such as Mandarin and English which have fewer structural overlaps compared to language pairs that are typologically closer, reducing cross-linguistic positive transfer. We examined these preschoolers’ spoken narrative skills as measured by macrostructures (the global organization of a story) and microstructures (linguistic structures, e.g., total number of utterances, nouns, verbs, phrases, and modifiers) across and within each language, and how various factors such as age and language experiences contribute to individual variability. The results indicate that our bilingual preschoolers acquired spoken narrative skills similarly across their two languages, i.e., showing similar patterns of productivity for macrostructure and microstructure elements in both of their two languages. While chronological age was positively correlated with macrostructures in both languages (showing developmental effects), there were no significant correlations between measures of language experiences and the measures of spoken narrative skills (no effects for language input/output). The findings suggest that although these preschoolers acquire two typologically diverse languages in different learning environments, Mandarin at home with highly educated parents, and English at preschool, they displayed similar levels of oral narrative skills as far as these macro−/micro-structure measures are concerned. This study provides further evidence for the feasibility of remote online assessment of preschoolers’ narrative skills., Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe; 821
- Published
- 2021
20. Have You Heard of Developmental Language Disorder? An Online Survey
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Benjamin Davies, and Jae-Hyun Kim
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Speech and Hearing ,Linguistics and Language - Abstract
Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder. It had been suggested that public awareness is low for DLD, especially in comparison with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia. This study investigated awareness of DLD, ASD, ADHD, and dyslexia, as well as specific language impairment (SLI) in Australia. An online survey about awareness and knowledge of DLD, SLI, ASD, ADHD, and dyslexia was completed by 272 people in Australia. People had low awareness of DLD (19.9%) compared with ASD (97.4%), ADHD (97.7%), and dyslexia (98.5%). The former label for the disorder, SLI, had an even lower level of awareness (9.4%). People have heard about DLD from a wide range of sources and were likely to have incorrect knowledge about DLD as well as believing ASD or ADHD to be the most prevalent disorders. Awareness and knowledge of DLD appear to be low. More targeted approaches to increasing public awareness of DLD are needed.
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- 2022
21. Alpha synchronisation of acoustic responses in active listening is indicative of native language listening experience
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Alyssa C. Dyball, Ronny K. Ibrahim, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Mridula Sharma
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Adult ,Linguistics and Language ,medicine.medical_specialty ,First language ,Alpha (ethology) ,Audiology ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language and Linguistics ,Speech and Hearing ,Tone (musical instrument) ,otorhinolaryngologic diseases ,medicine ,Humans ,Active listening ,Pitch Perception ,Language ,Australia ,Contrast (statistics) ,Acoustics ,humanities ,language.human_language ,language ,Speech Perception ,Syllable ,Psychology ,Language Experience Approach ,psychological phenomena and processes - Abstract
Objective Examine the effect of language experience on auditory evoked and oscillatory brain responses to lexical tone in passive (ACC) and active (P300) listening conditions. Design Language experience was evaluated using two groups, Mandarin- vs. English-listeners (with vs. without lexical tone experience). Two Mandarin lexical tones with pitch movement (T2 rising; T3 dipping) produced on the syllable /ba/ were used as stimuli. For passive listening, each tone was presented in a block. For active listening, each tone was the standard (80%) or deviant (20%) presented in two blocks. Presentation order was counterbalanced across participants in both tasks. Study sample 10 adult Mandarin-listeners and 13 Australian-English-listeners contributed to the data. Results Both global field power (GFP) and time frequency analysis (TFA) failed to detect group differences in passive listening conditions for the ACC response. In contrast, the active listening condition revealed significant group differences for T2. GFP showed a trending significance with larger GFP (less consistent responses) in English- than Mandarin-listeners. TFA showed significantly higher alpha synchronisation (more focussed attention) for Mandarin- compared to English-listeners. Conclusions Acoustic responses to speech is influenced by language experience but only during active listening, suggesting that focussed attention is linked to higher level language processes.
- Published
- 2021
22. Longer Cochlear Implant Experience Leads to Better Production of Mandarin Tones for Early Implanted Children
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ping Tang, Ivan Yuen, Liqun Gao, and Katherine Demuth
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medicine.medical_specialty ,Speech perception ,medicine.medical_treatment ,Tone (linguistics) ,Tonal language ,Audiology ,Mandarin Chinese ,Cochlear Implantation ,language.human_language ,Speech and Hearing ,Cochlear Implants ,Otorhinolaryngology ,Cochlear implant ,Child, Preschool ,medicine ,language ,Speech Perception ,Humans ,Psychology ,Child ,Pitch Perception ,psychological phenomena and processes ,Language - Abstract
Objectives Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns. It has been suggested that early implantation (i.e., before 2 years) greatly benefits the acquisition of Mandarin tones by children with CIs (Tang et al. 2019c). In this study, we extend those findings to investigate the effect of CI experience on the acquisition of Mandarin tones for children implanted early. We asked the extent to which they were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns of both lexical tones and T0 as a function of CI experience, and the extent to which their tonal productions were acoustically like that of NH children. Design Forty-four NH 3-year olds and 28 children implanted with CIs between 1 and 2 years, aged 3 to 7, were recruited. The children with CIs were grouped according to the length of CI experience: 3 to 6 years, 2 to 3 years, and 1 to 2 years. Lexical tone and T0 productions were elicited using a picture-naming task. Tonal productions from the children with CIs were acoustically analyzed and compared with those from the NH children. Results Children with 3 to 6 years of CI experience were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns for both lexical tones and T0, with NH-like acoustic realizations. Children with 2 to 3 years of CI experience were also able to produce the expected tonal patterns, although their productions were not yet NH-like. Those with only 1 to 2 years of CI experience, however, were not yet able to produce the distinct acoustic patterns for either lexical tones or T0. Conclusions These results provide acoustic evidence demonstrating that, when Mandarin-speaking children are implanted before the age of 2, only those with 3 to 6 years of experience were able to produce NH-like tones, including both lexical tone and T0. Children with shorter CI experience (less than 3 years) were unable to produce distinct acoustic patterns for the different tones. This suggests that at least 3 years of CI experience is still needed for early implanted children to acquire tonal distinctions similar to those of NH 3-year olds.
- Published
- 2021
23. The acquisition of phonological alternations: The case of the Mandarin tone sandhi process
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Liqun Gao, Ping Tang, and Ivan Yuen
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050101 languages & linguistics ,Linguistics and Language ,Process (engineering) ,05 social sciences ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Context (language use) ,Contrast (music) ,Mandarin Chinese ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,language.human_language ,Tone sandhi ,Phonological rule ,language ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Psychology ,General Psychology - Abstract
Phonological processes can pose a learning challenge for children, where the surface form for an underlying contrast may vary as a function of the phonological environment. Mandarin tone sandhi is a complex phonological process that requires knowledge about both the tonal and the prosodic context in which it applies. The present study explored the productive knowledge of tone sandhi processes by 108 3- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 33 adults. Participants were asked to produce novel tone sandhi compounds in different tonal contexts and prosodic structures. Acoustic analysis showed that 3-year-olds have abstracted the tone sandhi process and can productively apply it to novel disyllabic words across tonal contexts. However, even 5-year-olds still differed from adults in applying tone sandhi in response to the trisyllabic prosodic structure. The results are discussed in terms of the factors that influence how tone sandhi processes, and phonological alternations more generally, are acquired.
- Published
- 2019
24. Preschoolers’ developing comprehension of the plural: The effects of number and allomorphic variation
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Tamara Schembri, and Benjamin Davies
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Male ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Lexicon ,Language Development ,Vocabulary ,050105 experimental psychology ,Phonetics ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Humans ,Learning ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Allomorph ,Plural ,05 social sciences ,Age Factors ,Language acquisition ,Syntax ,Linguistics ,Semantics ,Comprehension ,Variation (linguistics) ,Child, Preschool ,Female ,Syllabic verse ,Psychology ,050104 developmental & child psychology - Abstract
Previous intermodal preferential looking (IPL) studies have found that children learning English acquire knowledge of plural allomorphs incrementally. The segmental plural /-s/ (e.g., cat s ) is understood at 24 months of age, whereas the syllabic plural /-əz/ (e.g., bus es ) is not comprehended until 36 months. Production studies also show ongoing challenges with the syllabic plural /-əz/, suggesting a prolonged weaker representation for this allomorph. IPL studies also suggest that children do not understand the singular, which has no overt marking, until 36 months of age. However, the status of children’s developing representations of the singular has been largely unstudied. The current study, therefore explored 116 3- and 4-year-olds’ developing comprehension of novel singular and plural words, where the plurals were inflected with segmental and syllabic plural allomorphs. Results found that children were equally proficient at identifying novel plurals of both allomorph types, increasing accuracy with age. However, children’s accuracy with novel singulars did not increase with age, raising questions about the representation of null morphology. Children’s equal accuracy across plural allomorphs is more consistent with rule-based models of morphological representation than those proposing morphology as an emergent property of the lexicon. However, neither model completely accounts for the developmental differences found between singular and plural.
- Published
- 2019
25. The production of Mandarin tones by early-implanted children with cochlear implants: effects from the length of implantation
- Author
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Zulayati Wufuer, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, Yujun Ren, Yanan Shen, Katherine Demuth, and Ping Tang
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,language ,medicine ,Biology ,Audiology ,Language acquisition ,Mandarin Chinese ,language.human_language - Published
- 2020
26. Depression and Anxiety in the Postnatal Period: An Examination of Infants' Home Language Environment, Vocalizations, and Expressive Language Abilities
- Author
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Denis K Burnham, Ruth Brookman, Marina Kalashnikova, Katherine Demuth, Janet Conti, Kerry-Ann Grant, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Longitudinal study ,Vocabulary ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Mothers ,Anxiety ,Language Development ,050105 experimental psychology ,Education ,Developmental psychology ,Depression, Postpartum ,Nonverbal communication ,Young Adult ,Child Development ,Child of Impaired Parents ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Longitudinal Studies ,Depression (differential diagnoses) ,media_common ,Depression ,Communication ,05 social sciences ,Infant, Newborn ,Infant ,Puerperal Disorders ,Language acquisition ,Mental health ,Vocabulary development ,Mother-Child Relations ,Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health ,Female ,medicine.symptom ,Psychology ,Child Language ,050104 developmental & child psychology - Abstract
Published 2020 August 3 This longitudinal study investigated the effects of maternal emotional health concerns, on infants' home language environment, vocalization quantity, and expressive language skills. Mothers and their infants (at 6 and 12 months; 21 mothers with depression and or anxiety and 21 controls) provided day-long home-language recordings. Compared with controls, risk group recordings contained fewer mother-infant conversational turns and infant vocalizations, but daily number of adult word counts showed no group difference. Furthermore, conversational turns and infant vocalizations were stronger predictors of infants' 18-month vocabulary size than depression and anxiety measures. However, anxiety levels moderated the effect of conversational turns on vocabulary size. These results suggest that variability in mothers' emotional health influences infants' language environment and later language ability. 18569924/University of Western Sydney
- Published
- 2020
27. Acquisition of weak syllables in tonal languages: acoustic evidence from neutral tone in Mandarin Chinese
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Katherine Demuth, Ivan Yuen, Liqun Gao, and Ping Tang
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Linguistics and Language ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Romance languages ,Audiology ,Language Development ,Mandarin Chinese ,Speech Acoustics ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Young Adult ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Child ,General Psychology ,Language ,05 social sciences ,Tone (linguistics) ,Intonation (linguistics) ,Linguistics ,Phonology ,Acoustics ,Language acquisition ,language.human_language ,Duration (music) ,Child, Preschool ,language ,Female ,Syllable ,Psychology ,050104 developmental & child psychology - Abstract
Weak syllables in Germanic and Romance languages have been reported to be challenging for young children, with syllable omission and/or incomplete reduction persisting till age five. In Mandarin Chinese, neutral tone (T0) involves a weak syllable with varied pitch realizations across (preceding) tonal contexts and short duration. The present study examined how and when T0 was acquired by 108 Beijing Mandarin-speaking children (3–5 years) relative to 33 adult controls. Lexicalized (familiar) and non-lexicalized (unfamiliar) T0 words were elicited in different preceding tonal contexts. Unlike previous reports, the present study revealed that children as young as three years have already developed a phonological category for T0, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations of T0 for both familiar and unfamiliar items. However, mastery of adult-like pitch and duration implementation of T0 is a protracted process not completed until age five. The implications for the acquisition of weak syllables more generally are discussed.
- Published
- 2018
28. Acoustic realization of Mandarin neutral tone and tone sandhi in infant-directed speech and Lombard speech
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, Katherine Demuth, and Ping Tang
- Subjects
Speech Communication ,Adult ,Sound Spectrography ,Speech perception ,Adolescent ,Acoustics and Ultrasonics ,Voice Quality ,Speech recognition ,Acoustics ,01 natural sciences ,Speech Acoustics ,050105 experimental psychology ,Pitch Discrimination ,Young Adult ,Tone (musical instrument) ,Speech Production Measurement ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Phonetics ,0103 physical sciences ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Maternal Behavior ,010301 acoustics ,Pitch contour ,Verbal Behavior ,05 social sciences ,Infant ,Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted ,Speech processing ,Mother-Child Relations ,Tone sandhi ,Speech Perception ,Cues ,Noise ,Psychology ,Perceptual Masking - Abstract
Mandarin lexical tones are modified in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech, resulting in tone hyperarticulation. However, it is unclear if these registers also alter contextual tones (neutral tone and tone sandhi) and if such phonetic modification might affect acquisition of these tones. This study therefore examined how neutral tone and tone sandhi are realized in IDS, and how their acoustic manifestations compare with those in Lombard speech, where the communicative needs of listeners differ. Neutral tone and tone sandhi productions were elicited from 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during (1) interactions with their 12-month-old infants (IDS), (2) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a noisy environment (Lombard speech), and (3) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). The results showed that, although both contextual tones were modified in IDS and Lombard speech, their key tone features were maintained. In addition, IDS and Lombard speech modified these tones differently: IDS increased pitch height and modified pitch contour, while Lombard speech increased pitch height only. The realization of neutral tone and tone sandhi across registers is discussed with reference to listeners' different communicative needs.
- Published
- 2017
29. The development of abstract representations of tone sandhi
- Author
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Ping Tang, Ivan Yuen, Liqun Gao, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Katherine Demuth
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,China ,Mandarin Chinese ,Developmental psychology ,Young Adult ,Phonetics ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,Humans ,Life-span and Life-course Studies ,Connected speech ,Demography ,Language ,Psycholinguistics ,Mental lexicon ,Tone (linguistics) ,Phonology ,Linguistics ,language.human_language ,Tone sandhi ,Phonological rule ,Child, Preschool ,language ,Speech Perception ,Female ,Psychology - Abstract
Phonological processes result in surface variants of the same words across phonological contexts, posing potential word learning challenges for children. Mandarin tone sandhi is a tonal process changing Tone 3 (T3) in different tonal and syntactic contexts, resulting in allophonic variants of T3 in connected speech. Previous studies found that Mandarin-learning 3-year-olds were able to productively apply tone sandhi processes in novel compounds, correctly using the allophonic variants of T3 in appropriate tone sandhi contexts (Tang et al., 2018, 2019). However, it remains unclear how these variants are represented in children's mental lexicon. This study, therefore, examined Mandarin-learning children's perceptual representation of allophonic variants of T3. Ninety-four 3- to 5-year-olds and 29 adults were tested. Sensitivity to allophonic mispronunciations of T3 syllables in novel tone sandhi compounds was measured using a visual fixation procedure. The results showed that children, like adults, treated tone sandhi mispronunciations as target-like. Thus, in recognizing novel tone sandhi words, Mandarin-speaking children exhibit flexibility in accommodating the allophonic variants of T3, suggesting that they have developed an abstract T3 category in their mental lexicon. The findings reveal the effect of phonological processes in shaping children's phonological representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
- Published
- 2019
30. The Acquisition of Mandarin Tonal Processes by Children With Cochlear Implants
- Author
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Katherine Demuth, Ivan Yuen, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Liqun Gao, and Ping Tang
- Subjects
Male ,Linguistics and Language ,medicine.medical_specialty ,China ,Realization (linguistics) ,Audiology ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language Development ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,03 medical and health sciences ,Speech and Hearing ,0302 clinical medicine ,medicine ,Humans ,Speech ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,030223 otorhinolaryngology ,Tonal system ,Language ,05 social sciences ,Tone (linguistics) ,Tonal language ,Infant ,Language acquisition ,language.human_language ,Tone sandhi ,Language development ,Cochlear Implants ,Child, Preschool ,language ,Female ,Psychology - Abstract
Purpose Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tonal languages, as CIs do not efficiently code pitch information. Mandarin is a tonal language with lexical tones and tonal processes such as neutral tone and tone sandhi, exhibiting contextually conditioned tonal realizations. Previous studies suggest that early implantation and long CI experience facilitate the acquisition of lexical tones by children with CIs. However, there is lack of acoustic evidence on children's tonal productions demonstrating that this is the case, and it is unclear whether and how children with CIs are able to acquire contextual tones. This study therefore examined the acoustic realization of both lexical tones and contextual tones as produced by children fitted with CIs, exploring the potential effects of age at implantation and length of CI experience on their acquisition of the Mandarin tonal system. Method Seventy-two Mandarin-learning preschoolers with CIs, varying in age at implantation (13–42 months) and length of CI experience (2–49 months), and 44 normal hearing 3-year-old controls were recruited. Tonal productions were elicited from both groups using picture-naming tasks and acoustically compared. Results Only the early implanted group (i.e., implanted before the age of 2 years) produced normal-like lexical tones and generally had contextual tones approximating those of the normal-hearing children. The other children, including those with longer CI experience, did not have typical tonal productions; their pitch patterns for lexical tones tended to be flatter, and contextual tone productions were unchanged across tonal contexts. Conclusion Children with CIs face challenges in acquiring Mandarin tones, but early implantation may help them to develop normal-like lexical tone categories, which further facilitates their implementation of contextual tones. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8038889
- Published
- 2019
31. Longer Cochlear Implant Experience Leads to Better Production of Mandarin Tones for Early Implanted Children.
- Author
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Ping Tang, Ivan Yuen, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Liqun Gao, Demuth, Katherine, Tang, Ping, Yuen, Ivan, Xu Rattanasone, Nan, and Gao, Liqun
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
32. Two-Year-Olds’ Sensitivity to Inflectional Plural Morphology: Allomorphic Effects
- Author
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Benjamin Davies, Katherine Demuth, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,Grammar ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,Phonology ,Language acquisition ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,Education ,Morpheme ,Inflection ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Allomorph ,Set (psychology) ,Psychology ,050104 developmental & child psychology ,Plural ,media_common - Abstract
Many English-speaking children use plural nominal forms in spontaneous speech before the age of two, and display some understanding of plural inflection in production tasks. However, results from an intermodal preferential study suggested a lack of comprehension of nominal plural morphology at 24 months of age (Kouider, Halberda, Wood, & Carey, 2006). The goal of the present study was to reexamine this issue using a phonologically and morphologically controlled set of stimuli. The results show that 24-month-olds do demonstrate understanding of nominal plural morphology, but only for the voiceless plural allomorph /s/, not /z/. Further study suggests that this result is not driven by input frequency, but rather by the longer duration of the /s/allomorph, which may enhance its perceptual salience. The implications for learning grammar more generally are discussed.
- Published
- 2016
33. Relationships between proficiency with grammatical morphemes and emotion regulation: a study of Mandarin–English preschoolers
- Author
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Katherine Demuth, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Shirley Wyver, Yonggang Ren, and Fabia Andronos
- Subjects
Social Psychology ,Grammar ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,050301 education ,Present tense ,Pediatrics ,Mandarin Chinese ,language.human_language ,Past tense ,Linguistics ,Analytic language ,Morpheme ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,language ,Task analysis ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Language proficiency ,Psychology ,0503 education ,050104 developmental & child psychology ,media_common ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
Previous research mainly with monolingual children shows a positive relationship between English skills and emotion regulation. No study to date has examined if or how learning of grammatical morphemes might be associated with emotion regulation among bilingual preschoolers. This study examined how Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers performed on three grammatical morphemes of plurals, past tense, present tense and whether the performance on the three morphemes was associated with emotion regulation. An elicitation task was used to assess proficiency in the three morphemes, and the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) and the Disappointing Gift task were used to assess emotion regulation. The results indicate that Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers had difficulties with all the three morphemes but they had a higher proficiency level on plurals than on past and present tense. Their proficiency in past and present tense was positively correlated with emotion regulation as measured by the ERC.
- Published
- 2016
34. Utilization of prosodic and linguistic cues during perceptions of nonunderstandings in radio communication
- Author
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Mark W. Wiggins, Ben J. Searle, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Jaime C. Auton
- Subjects
060201 languages & linguistics ,Protocol (science) ,Linguistics and Language ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,SIGNAL (programming language) ,Intonation (linguistics) ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Sample (statistics) ,06 humanities and the arts ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,Perception ,0602 languages and literature ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Psychology ,General Psychology ,media_common - Abstract
The readback/hearback loop is a communicative protocol used in many high-risk environments to ensure that a verbal instruction has beenheardcorrectly by a receiver. However, it does not necessarily ensure that an instruction has beenunderstood. Using an international sample of hydroelectric power generation controllers, this study examined whether particular linguistic (complete and partial readbacks) and prosodic (final intonation, filler, and interturn delay) cues contained within a readback response could signal to listeners the extent to which speakers had understood an instruction. The results indicated that different prosodic cues are used to detect nonunderstandings, depending upon the linguistic content of the readback. The results have implications for training and system design in distributed environments.
- Published
- 2016
35. 'You’re telling me!' The prevalence and predictors of pronoun reversals in children with autism spectrum disorders and typical development
- Author
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Michelle Cheng, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Saime Tek, Deborah Fein, Neha Khetrapal, Katherine Demuth, and Letitia R. Naigles
- Subjects
Pronoun ,Vocabulary ,Joint attention ,media_common.quotation_subject ,05 social sciences ,Psychological intervention ,medicine.disease ,Article ,Developmental psychology ,03 medical and health sciences ,Psychiatry and Mental health ,Clinical Psychology ,Typically developing ,0302 clinical medicine ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,Autism ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Psychology ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Early language ,050104 developmental & child psychology ,media_common ,Spontaneous speech - Abstract
Social and linguistic explanations have been proposed for pronoun reversals in young typically developing (TD) children and those with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The current study breaks new ground in investigating both explanations, comparing 18 TD toddlers and 15 children with ASD at similar language levels. Spontaneous speech was sampled every four months for six visits. Vocabulary and joint attention were also measured. Both groups produced pronoun reversals at low rates. The ASD group produced somewhat more reversals than the TD group, overall and at multiple visits. In the ASD group, early language and joint attention scores contributed significantly and independently to the incidence of reversal. Both linguistic and social factors seem implicated; moreover, reversals seem to occur when children’s language and social abilities develop asynchronously. These findings can help clinicians devise both linguistic and social interventions for the relevant children.
- Published
- 2016
36. The perception of Mandarin lexical tones by listeners from different linguistic backgrounds
- Author
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Hui Ling Xu, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Kimiko Tsukada
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Tone (linguistics) ,Second-language acquisition ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language and Linguistics ,language.human_language ,Linguistics ,Education ,Perception ,Australian English ,language ,Early childhood ,Psychology ,media_common - Abstract
Two groups of non-native adult learners of Mandarin in Australia were directly compared in their ability to perceive monosyllabic Mandarin words contrasting in lexical tones. They differed in their linguistic experience (non-heritage (n=10), heritage (n=12)). A group of eight native Mandarin speakers and a group of ten functionally monolingual speakers of Australian English were included as controls. All non-native learners used English as their primary language of communication. However, the heritage learners were able to communicate in Cantonese as well as English. The primary question of interest was whether heritage learners’ knowledge of contrastive tone in Cantonese might give them an advantage over English-speaking learners in perceiving tone contrasts in Mandarin. In general, there were more similarities than differences between the two groups of learners in their response patterns. Of the six tone contrasts examined (T1-T2, T1-T3, T1-T4, T2-T3, T2-T4, T3-T4), the two groups significantly differed only on T1-T4. The heritage learners were less accurate on T1-T4 than the non-heritage learners who are monolingual speakers of Australian English. On the other hand, the non-heritage learners were more accurate than Australian English speakers with no prior experience with Mandarin on all tone contrasts. Thus, we conclude that simply having an exposure to and functional knowledge of another tonal language since early childhood does not guarantee accurate perception of Mandarin tones in comparison with adult learners without prior experience with tonal languages.
- Published
- 2015
37. Social Competence and Language Skills in Mandarin–English Bilingual Preschoolers: The Moderation Effect of Emotion Regulation
- Author
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Shirley Wyver, Yonggang Ren, Katherine Demuth, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Subjects
business.industry ,media_common.quotation_subject ,education ,05 social sciences ,050301 education ,Standardized test ,Self-control ,Moderation ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,Mandarin Chinese ,Checklist ,language.human_language ,Education ,Developmental psychology ,Rating scale ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,language ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Social competence ,Language proficiency ,Psychology ,business ,0503 education ,050104 developmental & child psychology ,media_common - Abstract
Research Findings: The main aim of this study was to examine whether language skills and emotion regulation are associated with social competence and whether the relationship between English skills and social competence is moderated by emotion regulation in Mandarin–English bilingual preschoolers. The language skills of 96 children ages 36–69 months from Australian child care centers were assessed using standardized English and Mandarin tests. Social competence was assessed using teacher reports on the Behavior Assessment System for Children–2 (BASC-2) with 4 composite scales: Externalizing, Internalizing, Behavioral Symptoms, and Adaptive Skills. Positive emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation were assessed using the disappointing gift task and teacher report on the Emotion Regulation Checklist. The results show that positive emotion regulation, emotion dysregulation, English skills, and Mandarin skills were associated with different composites of the BASC-2; the relationships between Engli...
- Published
- 2015
38. Phonetic enhancement of Mandarin vowels and tones: Infant-directed speech and Lombard speech
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, Ping Tang, and Katherine Demuth
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Speech production ,Sound Spectrography ,Acoustics and Ultrasonics ,Adolescent ,Voice Quality ,Speech recognition ,Acoustics ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Mothers ,Intelligibility (communication) ,01 natural sciences ,Mandarin Chinese ,050105 experimental psychology ,Speech Acoustics ,Young Adult ,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) ,Speech Production Measurement ,Phonetics ,Vowel ,0103 physical sciences ,Humans ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Conversation ,010301 acoustics ,media_common ,05 social sciences ,Infant ,Speech processing ,language.human_language ,Noise ,QUIET ,language ,Female ,Psychology - Abstract
Speech units are reported to be hyperarticulated in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech. Since these two registers have typically been studied separately, it is unclear if the same speech units are hyperarticulated in the same manner between these registers. The aim of the present study is to compare the effect of register on vowel and tone modification in the tonal language Mandarin Chinese. Vowel and tone productions were produced by 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during interactions with their 12-month-old infants during a play session (IDS), in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a 70 dBA eight-talker babble noise environment (Lombard speech), and in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). Vowel space expansion was observed in IDS and Lombard speech, however, the patterns of vowel-shift were different between the two registers. IDS displayed tone space expansion only in the utterance-final position, whereas there was no tone space expansion in Lombard speech. The overall pitch increased for all tones in both registers. The tone-bearing vowel duration also increased in both registers, but only in utterance-final position. The difference in speech modifications between these two registers is discussed in light of speakers' different communicative needs.
- Published
- 2017
39. The acquisition of coda consonants by Mandarin early child L2 learners of English
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone and Katherine Demuth
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Phonology ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,language.human_language ,Education ,Coda ,Perception ,Australian English ,L2 learners ,language ,Syllable ,Psychology ,Imitation ,media_common - Abstract
Little is known about the acquisition of phonology in children learning a second language before the age of four. The study of Mandarin children's early learning of English coda consonants is of particular interest because of the different syllable structures permitted in the two languages. Using an elicited imitation task, this study explored the acquisition of coda consonants and related phrase-final lengthening in twelve three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children exposed to Australian English at preschool. Performance was good on /t/ and /s/ codas, but worse on the phonologically and morphologically more complex /ts/ coda. Although /n/ is one of the few codas permitted in Mandarin, both perceptual and acoustic analysis revealed surprisingly poor performance, suggesting possible L1 Mandarin effects. As expected, longer exposure to English resulted in better coda production. The results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying L2 phonological and morphological acquisition in early child second language learners (ECL2).
- Published
- 2013
40. The Acquisition of Productive Plural Morphology by Children With Hearing Loss.
- Author
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Davies, Benjamin, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Davis, Aleisha, and Demuth, Katherine
- Subjects
- *
AGE distribution , *AUDITORY perception , *COCHLEAR implants , *COMPUTER software , *CONSONANTS , *HEARING aids , *LANGUAGE acquisition , *RESEARCH funding , *SPEECH evaluation , *STATISTICS , *T-test (Statistics) , *VOWELS , *DATA analysis , *GROUP process , *TASK performance , *DESCRIPTIVE statistics ,RESEARCH evaluation - Abstract
Purpose: Normal-hearing (NH) children acquire plural morphemes at different rates, with the segmental allomorphs /–s, –z/ (e.g., cat-s) being acquired before the syllabic allomorph /–əz/ (e.g., bus-es). Children with hearing loss (HL) have been reported to show delays in the production of plural morphology, raising the possibility that this might be due to challenges acquiring different types of lexical/morphological representations. This study therefore examined the comprehension of plural morphology by 3- to 7-year-olds with HL and compared this with performance by their NH peers. We also investigated comprehension as a function of wearing hearing aids (HAs) versus cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Participants included 129 NH children aged 3–5 years and 25 children with HL aged 3–7 years (13 with HAs, 12 with CIs). All participated in a novel word two-alternative forced-choice task presented on an iPad. The task tested comprehension of the segmental (e.g., teps, mubz) and syllabic (e.g., kosses) plural, as well as their singular counterparts (e.g., tep, mub, koss). Results: While the children with NH were above chance for all conditions, those with HL performed at chance. As a group, the performance of the children with HL did not improve with age. However, results suggest possible differences between children with HAs and those with CIs, where those with HAs appeared to be in the process of developing representations of consonant–vowel–consonant singulars. Conclusions: Results suggest that preschoolers with HL do not yet have a robust representation of plural morphology for words they have not heard before. However, those with HAs are beginning to access the singular/plural system as they get older. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2020
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
41. Abstracts of the English papers in Chinese
- Author
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Hui Ling Xu, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Kimiko Tsukada
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,Language and Linguistics ,Education - Abstract
The perception of Mandarin lexical tones by listeners from different linguistic backgrounds不同语言背景学生对汉字声调的辨认本文调查两组中文非母语背景的澳大利亚中文学生对汉语单字声调的辩认能力。这两组学生分别是传承语学生 (共 10 人) 和非传承语学生 (共 12 人)。另有八名中文作为母语的学生和十名只讲澳大利亚英语的单语学生 (即: 非中文学生) 作为参照组。所有非传承语中文学生主要以英文为沟通渠道,但传承语的中文学生具广东话和英文能力。本研究的首要目的在于调查传承语学生是否由于有广东话声调的知识而在辨认普通话声调上比讲英文的中文学生占优势。调查的结果显示,总体来说,两组显现的相似地方多于差异。在被调查的六组对比声调中 (T1–T2, T1–T3, T1–T4, T2–T3, T2–T4, T3–T4), 最具明显差异的是在 T1–T4 的对比辨认上。传承语学生在 T1–T4 的辨认上要比非传承语的中文学生更缺乏准确性,然而,非传承语学生在所有语调对比的实验中的准确性高于只讲澳大利亚英文的参照组学生。我们的实验表明,从小就接触过另一个有声调的语言并不能保障他们在辨认中文声调上会比没有这方面知识的成人学生更加准确。
- Published
- 2015
42. Tone and vowel enhancement in Cantonese infant-directed speech at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of age
- Author
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Ronan G. Reilly, Denis K Burnham, and Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Subjects
Speech and Hearing ,Linguistics and Language ,Vowel ,Perception ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Speech recognition ,Psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Early language ,media_common ,Tone language - Abstract
Vowel and tone hyperarticulation were investigated in infant-directed speech (IDS) in Cantonese, a tone language. Native Cantonese speaking mothers were recorded speaking to their infants on four occasions, at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. Unexpectedly, no vowel hyperarticulation in terms of vowel triangle areas or in the dimensions of tongue height or backness (F1 and F2 values) was found in IDS compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Tone hyperarticulation in IDS, as indexed by the relative area of tone triangles in f0 onset and f0 offset space compared to those in ADS, was found in IDS to infants at all four ages but was reduced somewhat in 12-month-olds. Given that infants’ perceptual attunement to lexical tone begins around 4 months, it appears that parents’ tone hyperarticulation begins before infants have perceptually tuned into native tones and begins to decline by the end of the first year. This provides support for the hypothesis that tone hyperarticulation serves as a bootstrapping mechanism in early language development in tone languages.
- Published
- 2013
43. Prosodic Cues Used During Perceptions of Nonunderstandings in Radio Communication
- Author
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Mark W. Wiggins, Ben J. Searle, Thomas Loveday, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Jaime C. Auton
- Subjects
Radio communications ,Protocol (science) ,Linguistics and Language ,Communication ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Speech recognition ,Control (management) ,Intonation (linguistics) ,Language and Linguistics ,Perception ,Communication source ,Psychology ,Prosody ,Practical implications ,media_common - Abstract
The readback/hearback protocol is a radio procedure intended to reduce communication errors in technical industries. It consists of the delivery of an instruction to a receiver, and the readback of that instruction by the receiver to confirm to the sender that it has been heard accurately. It does not, however, ensure that the receiver has understood the instruction. Using 2 samples within electricity transmission control, the present research explored whether the prosodic cues that listeners use to interpret uncertainty are also used to judge whether a receiver is perceived to have understood an instruction. Rising intonation and filled interturn delays were identified as prosodic cues that operators use to identify nonunderstandings. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are considered.
- Published
- 2013
44. Universality and language-specific experience in the perception of lexical tone and pitch
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Virginie Attina, Sudaporn Luksaneeyanawin, Denis K Burnham, Amanda Reid, Francisco Lacerda, Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Diane Webster, and Benjawan Kasisopa
- Subjects
General Language Studies and Linguistics ,Linguistics and Language ,Tone ,Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,language-specific ,Contrast (music) ,perception ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language and Linguistics ,Linguistics ,language.human_language ,Universality (dynamical systems) ,Focus (linguistics) ,Violin ,Noise ,Tone (musical instrument) ,Perception ,universals ,language ,Psychology ,General Psychology ,pitch ,media_common - Abstract
Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch–accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory–visual discrimination by tone and pitch–accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch–accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch–accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the results show that tone perception is determined by both auditory and visual information, by acoustic and linguistic contexts, and by universal and experiential factors.
- Published
- 2015
45. Intelligibility of Speech Produced by Children with Hearing Loss: Conventional Amplification versus Nonlinear Frequency Compression in Hearing Aids
- Author
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Laura Button, Gretel Macdonald, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Katherine Demuth, Vicky W. Zhang, and Teresa Y. C. Ching
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Speech production ,business.product_category ,Hearing loss ,Audiology ,Intelligibility (communication) ,medicine.disease ,behavioral disciplines and activities ,Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) ,otorhinolaryngologic diseases ,medicine ,Active listening ,medicine.symptom ,Psychology ,business ,Speech-Language Pathology ,psychological phenomena and processes ,Noise-induced hearing loss ,Headphones - Abstract
Objective: This study aimed to 1) investigate the influence of nonlinear frequency compression (NLFC) in hearing aids on intelligibility of speech produced by children with hearing loss; and 2) examine whether clinicians’ or parents’ judgments might be correlated with those of inexperienced listeners. Methods: Twenty-seven adult listeners with normal hearing who reported no experience listening to speech produced by people with hearing loss were asked to judge the intelligibility of speech samples of eight hearingimpaired children under four aided conditions. Also, the parents and the clinicians who provided services to the children provided ratings. The children were enrolled in a four-period multi-site trial that was aimed to compare the effects of conventional processing with NLFC in hearing aids on children’s performance. In that study, the children were familiarized with each of four hearing-aid setting for at least six weeks before they were evaluated using a range of tests, including the production of 20 sentences. The current study used the recorded sentences as stimuli for intelligibility judgments. Each listener heard sentences produced by two child-talkers, 40 from each talker. The stimuli were presented to listeners at 65 dB SPL via headphones. Four child-talkers received ratings from eight listeners and four from seven listeners. Results: Group-level results indicate that speech intelligibility was rated to be better by inexperienced listeners when children used NLFC than when they did not. Three child-talkers showed a significant advantage with NLFC activation. These results are consistent with the estimated audible bandwidth of hearing aids for individual talkers. Significant positive correlations for intelligibility ratings between inexperienced listeners and clinicians were found, but neither correlated with ratings from parents. Conclusions: The use of NLFC improved intelligibility of speech produced by children, on average, as rated by inexperienced listeners. Clinicians’ judgment of children’s speech production is a clinically viable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of amplification for children.
- Published
- 2015
46. Perceptual assimilation of lexical tone: the roles of language experience and visual information
- Author
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Ronan G. Reilly, Virginie Attina, Catherine T. Best, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Amanda Reid, Denis K Burnham, and Benjawan Kasisopa
- Subjects
Auditory perception ,Adult ,Male ,Linguistics and Language ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Visual perception ,Speech perception ,media_common.quotation_subject ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Audiology ,Models, Psychological ,Mandarin Chinese ,Language and Linguistics ,Article ,Auditory–visual speech ,Discrimination, Psychological ,Mental Processes ,Phonetics ,Perception ,Australian English ,Lexical tones ,medicine ,Humans ,Perceptual assimilation model ,media_common ,Language ,Medicine(all) ,Sensory Systems ,language.human_language ,Linguistics ,Nonnative speech perception ,Categorization ,Acoustic Stimulation ,language ,Auditory Perception ,Speech Perception ,Visual Perception ,Female ,Cues ,Psychology ,Photic Stimulation ,Psychomotor Performance - Abstract
Using Best’s (1995) perceptual assimilation model (PAM), we investigated auditory–visual (AV), auditory-only (AO), and visual-only (VO) perception of Thai tones. Mandarin and Cantonese (tone-language) speakers were asked to categorize Thai tones according to their own native tone categories, and Australian English (non-tone-language) speakers to categorize Thai tones into their native intonation categories—for instance, question or statement. As comparisons, Thai participants completed a straightforward identification task, and another Australian English group identified the Thai tones using simple symbols. All of the groups also completed an AX discrimination task. Both the Mandarin and Cantonese groups categorized AO and AV Thai falling tones as their native level tones, and Thai rising tones as their native rising tones, although the Mandarin participants found it easier to categorize Thai level tones than did the Cantonese participants. VO information led to very poor categorization for all groups, and AO and AV information also led to very poor categorizations for the English intonation categorization group. PAM’s predictions regarding tone discriminability based on these category assimilation patterns were borne out for the Mandarin group’s AO and AV discriminations, providing support for the applicability of the PAM to lexical tones. For the Cantonese group, however, PAM was unable to account for one specific discrimination pattern—namely, their relatively good performance on the Thai high–rising contrast in the auditory conditions—and no predictions could be derived for the English groups. A full account of tone assimilation will likely need to incorporate considerations of phonetic, and even acoustic, similarity and overlap between nonnative and native tone categories.
- Published
- 2014
47. How to compare tones
- Author
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Denis K Burnham, Benjawan Kasisopa, Nan Xu Rattanasone, and Virginie Attina
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Rose (mathematics) ,General method ,Speech recognition ,language ,Notation ,Mandarin Chinese ,language.human_language ,Linguistics ,Mathematics - Published
- 2013
48. Acoustic realization of Mandarin neutral tone and tone sandhi in infant-directed speech and Lombard speech.
- Author
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Ping Tang, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ivan Yuen, and Demuth, Katherine
- Subjects
- *
MANDARIN dialects , *CHINESE language , *SANDHI , *INTONATION (Phonetics) , *ORAL interpretation , *TONE (Phonetics) - Abstract
Mandarin lexical tones are modified in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech, resulting in tone hyperarticulation. However, it is unclear if these registers also alter contextual tones (neutral tone and tone sandhi) and if such phonetic modification might affect acquisition of these tones. This study therefore examined how neutral tone and tone sandhi are realized in IDS, and how their acoustic manifestations compare with those in Lombard speech, where the communicative needs of listeners differ. Neutral tone and tone sandhi productions were elicited from 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during (1) interactions with their 12-month-old infants (IDS), (2) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a noisy environment (Lombard speech), and (3) in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). The results showed that, although both contextual tones were modified in IDS and Lombard speech, their key tone features were maintained. In addition, IDS and Lombard speech modified these tones differently: IDS increased pitch height and modified pitch contour, while Lombard speech increased pitch height only. The realization of neutral tone and tone sandhi across registers is discussed with reference to listeners' different communicative needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
49. Phonetic enhancement of Mandarin vowels and tones: Infant-directed speech and Lombard speech.
- Author
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Ping Tang, Nan Xu Rattanasone, Yuen, Ivan, and Demuth, Katherine
- Subjects
- *
TONE (Phonetics) , *MANDARIN dialects , *VOWELS , *MOTHER-infant relationship , *SPACE ,SPOKEN Chinese - Abstract
Speech units are reported to be hyperarticulated in both infant-directed speech (IDS) and Lombard speech. Since these two registers have typically been studied separately, it is unclear if the same speech units are hyperarticulated in the same manner between these registers. The aim of the present study is to compare the effect of register on vowel and tone modification in the tonal language Mandarin Chinese. Vowel and tone productions were produced by 15 Mandarin-speaking mothers during interactions with their 12-month-old infants during a play session (IDS), in conversation with a Mandarin-speaking adult in a 70 dBA eight-talker babble noise environment (Lombard speech), and in a quiet environment (adult-directed speech). Vowel space expansion was observed in IDS and Lombard speech, however, the patterns of vowel-shift were different between the two registers. IDS displayed tone space expansion only in the utterance-final position, whereas there was no tone space expansion in Lombard speech. The overall pitch increased for all tones in both registers. The tone-bearing vowel duration also increased in both registers, but only in utterance-final position. The difference in speech modifications between these two registers is discussed in light of speakers' different communicative needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
50. 3-year-olds produce pitch contours consistent with Mandarin tone 3 sandhi
- Author
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Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ping Tang, Ivan Yuen, Liqun Gao, and Katherine Demuth
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