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This study established psycholinguistic norms in Cantonese for a set of 1286 colored pictures sourced from several picture databases, including 750 colored line drawings from MultiPic (Duñabeitia et al., 2018) and 536 photographs selected for McRae et al. (2005) concepts. The pictures underwent rigorous normalization processes. We provided picture characteristics including name and concept agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and frequency of modal responses. Through correlational analyses, we observed strong interrelationships among these variables. We also compared the current Cantonese norming to other languages and demonstrated similarity and variations among different languages. Additionally, we embraced the multilingual diversity within the current sample, and found that higher Cantonese proficiency but lower non-native language proficiency were associated with better spoken picture naming. Last but not least, we validated the predictive power of normed variables calculated from typed responses to spoken picture naming, and the consistency between typed and spoken responses. The present norming provides a timely and valuable alternative for researchers in the field of psycholinguistics, especially those studying Cantonese production and lexical retrieval. All raw data, analysis scripts, and final norming results are available online as psycholinguistic norms for Cantonese in the following link at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/dz9j6/?view_only=a452d8a56c92430b9dedf21ac26b1bc1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates force shift, a phenomenon in which the canonical discourse conventions, or force, associated with a clause type can be overridden to yield polar questions with the help of additional force-indicating devices. Previous studies attribute force shift to the presence of a complex question force component operating on semantic content. Based on utterance particles and particle clusters in Cantonese, we analyze force shift as resulting from compositional operations on force-bearing expressions. We propose that a simplex force, such as assertion or question, denotes unanchored sentence acts, while a force-shifting particle like Cantonese ho2 is an anchoring function anchoring a sentence act to the speaker while querying whether or not the addressee can perform the sentence act. The proposed semantics makes predictions about ho2's interactions with addressee-changing operations and imperatives, as well as about a larger family of force shift phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have focused on value structures, experiences, and cultural diversity as it relates to bioswale planning and implementation. We used 'Point of Opportunity Interactions' to understand previously undocumented views of the Cantonese-speaking immigrant community regarding bioswale design and use for stormwater management in Portland, Oregon, USA. Approximately half of participants were not aware of bioswale function. Maintenance costs and aesthetics were noted concerns, but parking and safety were not. Lack of outreach materials in the Chinese language(s), evening and weekend work schedules, and lack of clarity about maintenance responsibility were among barriers to public participation. Overall, lack of trust for the city and city officials was apparent, and hindered outreach and engagement. Emphasis on informality and place-based data collection near bioswales as neutral outdoors spaces, and proximate to participant residences, facilitated communication with this 'hard-to-reach' population and revealed information that would have gone unknown using traditional outreach strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several norms of psycholinguistic features of Chinese characters exist in Mandarin Chinese, but only a few are available in Cantonese or in the traditional script, and none includes semantic radical transparency ratings. This study presents subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), familiarity, imageability, concreteness, and semantic radical transparency in 4376 Chinese characters. The single Chinese characters were rated individually on the five dimensions by 20 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong to form the Hong Kong Chinese Character Psycholinguistic Norms (HKCCPN). The split-half reliability and intra-class correlations testified to the high internal reliability of the ratings. Their convergent and discriminant patterns in relations to other psycholinguistic measures echoed previous findings reported on Chinese. There were high correlations for semantic radical transparency, imageability and concreteness, and moderate-to-high correlations for AoA and familiarity among subsets of items that had been collected in previous studies. Concurrent validity analyses showed convergence in predicting behavioral response times in various tasks (lexical decision, naming, and writing-to-dictation) when compared with other Chinese character databases. High predictive validity was shown in writing-to-dictation data from an independent sample of 20 native Cantonese speakers. Several objective psycholinguistic measures (character frequency, stroke number, number of words formed, number of homophones and number of meanings) were included in this database to facilitate its use. These new ratings extend the currently available norms in language and reading research in Cantonese Chinese for researchers, clinicians, and educators, as well as provide them with a wider choice of stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, it is argued that sentences with sai2mat1 'needn't' in Cantonese are rhetorical questions and sai2mat1 'needn't' is a root modal that undergoes movement to a higher position above TP, exhibiting epistemic-like properties. Under the cartographic approach, the rhetorical reading is derived by an interrogative feature [Int] of C, a null negative operator in CP, and an interpretable assertive feature [Assert] of F collectively. Rhetorical questions should be used in root contexts, implying that indirect rhetorical questions do not exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being spoken by a large population of speakers worldwide, Cantonese is under-resourced in terms of the data scale and diversity compared to other major languages. This limitation has excluded it from the current “pre-training and fine-tuning” paradigm that is dominated by Transformer architectures. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on the existing resources and methodologies for Cantonese Natural Language Processing, covering the recent progress in language understanding, text generation and development of language models. We finally discuss two aspects of the Cantonese language that could make it potentially challenging even for state-of-the-art architectures: colloquialism and multilinguality [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and without ASD. Acoustic analyses showed that, compared with typically developing peers, children with ASD exhibited increased pitch variations when imitating lexical tones, while performed similarly when imitating the nonspeech counterparts. Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD failed to exploit the phonological knowledge of segments to improve the imitation accuracy of non-native lexical tones. These findings help clarify the speech-specific pitch processing atypicality and phonological processing deficit in tone-language-speaking children with ASD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picture-naming latency differs across languages in bilingual speakers. We compared the effects of key psycholinguistic variables on picture naming among two groups of Chinese bilingual speakers and Mandarin monolingual speakers. First, we asked bilingual and monolingual speakers to estimate the age of acquisition, familiarity, visual complexity, name agreement, and imageability of a set of object and action pictures in Mandarin and Cantonese. Next, we recruited 60 Cantonese-English speakers, 50 Mandarin-Cantonese bilingual speakers, and 30 monolingual speakers who named the object and action pictures in Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively. We observed variability in the effects of item-level characteristics among groups, suggesting an interaction between item-level and individual-level characteristics as predicted. This variability was higher in bilingual speakers who spoke similar languages (Mandarin-Cantonese) in comparison to those speaking more distant languages (Cantonese-English). Our results suggest that monolingual norms and bilingual norms capture the same amount of variability; however, grammatical class interactions with other variables are explained differentially by the bilingual and monolingual norms. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of norming studies for timed picture naming and effects of bilingualism on language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Atypicalities in the prosodic aspects of speech are commonly considered in clinical assessments of autism. While there is an increasing number of studies using objective measures to assess prosodic deficits, such studies have primarily focused on the intonational and rhythmic aspects of prosody. Little is known about prosodic deficits that are reflected at the segmental level, despite the strong connection between prosody and segmental realization. This study examines the nature of sibilant–vowel coarticulation among male adult native speakers of Cantonese with autism and those without.Fifteen Cantonese-speaking autistic (ASD) adults (mean age = 25 years) and 23 neuro-typical (NT) adults (mean age = 20 years) participated. Each participant read aloud 42 syllables with a sibilant onset in carrier phrase. Spectral means and variance, skewness and kurtosis were measured, and regressed by vocalic rounding (rounded vs. unrounded), cohort (ASD vs. NT), sibilant duration, and articulation rate.While neurotypical participants exhibit sibilant–vowel coarticulation that are sensitive to variation in sibilant duration, autistic participants show no sensitivity to segmental temporal changes.These findings point to the potential for atypicalities in prosody-segment interaction as an important characteristic of autistic speech.Methods: Atypicalities in the prosodic aspects of speech are commonly considered in clinical assessments of autism. While there is an increasing number of studies using objective measures to assess prosodic deficits, such studies have primarily focused on the intonational and rhythmic aspects of prosody. Little is known about prosodic deficits that are reflected at the segmental level, despite the strong connection between prosody and segmental realization. This study examines the nature of sibilant–vowel coarticulation among male adult native speakers of Cantonese with autism and those without.Fifteen Cantonese-speaking autistic (ASD) adults (mean age = 25 years) and 23 neuro-typical (NT) adults (mean age = 20 years) participated. Each participant read aloud 42 syllables with a sibilant onset in carrier phrase. Spectral means and variance, skewness and kurtosis were measured, and regressed by vocalic rounding (rounded vs. unrounded), cohort (ASD vs. NT), sibilant duration, and articulation rate.While neurotypical participants exhibit sibilant–vowel coarticulation that are sensitive to variation in sibilant duration, autistic participants show no sensitivity to segmental temporal changes.These findings point to the potential for atypicalities in prosody-segment interaction as an important characteristic of autistic speech.Results: Atypicalities in the prosodic aspects of speech are commonly considered in clinical assessments of autism. While there is an increasing number of studies using objective measures to assess prosodic deficits, such studies have primarily focused on the intonational and rhythmic aspects of prosody. Little is known about prosodic deficits that are reflected at the segmental level, despite the strong connection between prosody and segmental realization. This study examines the nature of sibilant–vowel coarticulation among male adult native speakers of Cantonese with autism and those without.Fifteen Cantonese-speaking autistic (ASD) adults (mean age = 25 years) and 23 neuro-typical (NT) adults (mean age = 20 years) participated. Each participant read aloud 42 syllables with a sibilant onset in carrier phrase. Spectral means and variance, skewness and kurtosis were measured, and regressed by vocalic rounding (rounded vs. unrounded), cohort (ASD vs. NT), sibilant duration, and articulation rate.While neurotypical participants exhibit sibilant–vowel coarticulation that are sensitive to variation in sibilant duration, autistic participants show no sensitivity to segmental temporal changes.These findings point to the potential for atypicalities in prosody-segment interaction as an important characteristic of autistic speech.Conclusion: Atypicalities in the prosodic aspects of speech are commonly considered in clinical assessments of autism. While there is an increasing number of studies using objective measures to assess prosodic deficits, such studies have primarily focused on the intonational and rhythmic aspects of prosody. Little is known about prosodic deficits that are reflected at the segmental level, despite the strong connection between prosody and segmental realization. This study examines the nature of sibilant–vowel coarticulation among male adult native speakers of Cantonese with autism and those without.Fifteen Cantonese-speaking autistic (ASD) adults (mean age = 25 years) and 23 neuro-typical (NT) adults (mean age = 20 years) participated. Each participant read aloud 42 syllables with a sibilant onset in carrier phrase. Spectral means and variance, skewness and kurtosis were measured, and regressed by vocalic rounding (rounded vs. unrounded), cohort (ASD vs. NT), sibilant duration, and articulation rate.While neurotypical participants exhibit sibilant–vowel coarticulation that are sensitive to variation in sibilant duration, autistic participants show no sensitivity to segmental temporal changes.These findings point to the potential for atypicalities in prosody-segment interaction as an important characteristic of autistic speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates asymmetries in doubling among verbs, objects and subjects in Cantonese. It is shown that each of these elements has a distinct doubling profile in topic constructions and right dislocation: doubling is sometimes prohibited, required or optional. Couched in terms of the copy theory of movement, I suggest that the operation responsible for erasing copies in a movement chain is regulated by phonological requirements that follow from a version of cyclic linearization. Particularly, I propose that the copy-erasing operation can be suspended as a last resort in cases where its application would otherwise violate phonological requirements imposed by cyclic linearization. The differences in doubling possibility among verbs, objects and subjects follow from the availability of the edge position of a phase to these elements. The proposal derives the Cantonese doubling pattern without recourse to the phrase-structural status of the (non-)doubling elements and maintains that the mechanism that determines copy pronunciation is the same for heads and phrases. I take this as a further piece of evidence for the unification of head and phrasal movement, resonating with much recent work on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the effects of contextual predictability on orthographic and phonological activation during Chinese sentence reading by Cantonese-speaking readers using the error disruption paradigm. Participants' eye fixations and pupil sizes were recorded while they silently read Chinese sentences containing homophonic, orthographic, and unrelated errors. Sentences had varying amounts of contextual information leading up to target words such that some targets were more predictable than others. Results of the fixation time analysis indicated that orthographic effects were significant in first fixation and gaze duration, while phonological effects emerged later in total reading time. However, interactions between predictability and the homophonic condition were found in gaze duration. These results suggest that, while Cantonese readers activate word meanings primarily through orthography in early processing, early phonological activation can occur when facilitated by semantics in high-constraint sentence contexts. Analysis of pupillary response measurements revealed that participants' pupil sizes became larger when they read words containing orthographic errors, suggesting that orthographic error recovery processes significantly increase cognitive load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different factors have been claimed to affect the choice of repair on English words with ill-formed Cantonese phonotactics in Cantonese loanword phonology. The first half of this paper presents experimental evidence showing that variation is observed only when repairing different onset cluster types: there is vowel epenthesis for s + consonant (sC) clusters but deletion of the second consonant for other (OR) clusters. I propose that the Syllable Mapping Grammar (SMG), the syllable structure mapping component of the perception grammar, drives such variation: Cantonese speakers assign different phonological representations based on cluster well-formedness. When they perceive words with an sC cluster, their SMG assigns [s] as syllabic. A full OT grammar is also provided. I present evidence for the knowledge of cluster well-formedness from speakers of languages like Cantonese where complex onsets are absent. Potential sources of such knowledge and other alternatives to my proposal are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional automatic assessment of pathological speech usually follows two main steps: (1) extraction of pathology-specific features; (2) classification or regression on extracted features. Given the great variety of speech and language disorders, feature design is never a straightforward task, and yet it is most crucial to the performance of assessment. This paper presents an end-to-end approach to automatic speech assessment for Cantonese-speaking People With Aphasia (PWA). The assessment is formulated as a binary classification task to discriminate PWA with high scores of subjective assessment from those with low scores. The 2-layer Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models are applied to realize the end-to-end mapping from basic speech features to the classification outcome. The pathology-specific features used for assessment are learned implicitly by the neural network model. The Class Activation Mapping (CAM) method is utilized to visualize how the learned features contribute to the assessment result. Experimental results show that the end-to-end approach can achieve comparable performance to the conventional two-step approach in the classification task, and the CNN model is able to learn impairment-related features that are similar to the hand-crafted features. The experimental results also indicate that CNN model performs better than 2-layer GRU model in this specific task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued in this paper that a sentence should consist of at least three layers, namely proposition, grounding, and response, which are formed by a number of functional categories, such as Event, Temp, Focus, Degree, and CoA. A cartographic analysis of the performative projections can be supported by the data of the sentence-final particles in Cantonese, focusing on the sentence-final particle ho and other members of the h-family, which may allow us to have a better understanding of the syntax of the speech act domain and should have implications for the cross-linguistic study of the performatives and the theory of the Universal Grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cantonese exhibits dislocation copying, a phenomenon whereby some syntactic material in a canonical sentence is repeated after the sentence particle. This paper demonstrates that the familiar Move-and-Elide analysis does not readily accommodate the structural properties of dislocation copying. Instead, the derivation of dislocation copying involves the formation of parallel Ā-chains. The apparent copying character of dislocation copying, accordingly, is the result of neither Move-and-Elide nor spell-out of multiple chain links, both prevalent mechanisms for yielding repetition. The current proposal sheds a fresh light on an ill-understood area of Cantonese syntax with regard to dislocation in general, and lends additional support to utilizing parallel chains in grammar as a syntactic means of yielding repetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the construction of a multimodal annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by native healthy speakers of Cantonese and individuals with language impairment: the Cantonese AphasiaBank. This corpus was established as a foundation for aphasiologists and clinicians to use in designing and conducting research investigations into theoretical and clinical issues related to acquired language disorders in Chinese. Details in terms of the purpose, structure, and levels of annotation of the database (containing part-of-speech-annotated orthographic transcripts with Romanization and the corresponding videos) are described. The discussion presents the challenges of building a spoken database of a language that is not linguistically well-researched and that does not have a standardized written form for many of its lexical items, as well as presenting how these issues were addressed. Most importantly, the article highlights the potential of Cantonese AphasiaBank as a powerful research tool for linguists and psycholinguists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The needs of cancer survivors have been well documented and tend to be higher in immigrant populations. In order to help address unmet needs of Chinese-speaking cancer survivors, we have developed a structured psycho-educational program for this group. The program development was informed by both cultural values of the population and published recommendations for cancer survivorship education and support. The program, entitled BE ACTIVE, includes topics related to key domains in cancer survivorship: psychosocial aspects, general medical management and follow up for late effects, complementary medicine, and lifestyle management through fitness and nutrition. We studied the program delivery in 2012 and 2013, where a total of 124 individuals took part. Participants reported high satisfaction, learning gains, and the willingness to recommend the program to others; they rated their understanding of the behaviors needed for wellness and their motivation for change as high. A facilitator toolkit, which includes topic content development guides and presentation examples, was developed to assist with delivery of the program by other centers. This type of program can improve access and delivery to underserved populations with unmet needs and may also benefit cancer survivors in other jurisdictions with similar concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated whether intonation deficits were observed in 19 Cantonese-speaking adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) when compared to 19 matched neurotypical (NT) controls. This study also investigated the use of sentence-final particles (SFPs) and their relationship with intonation in both groups. Standard deviations ( SDs) of the fundamental frequency (F0), the total number and the type of SFPs were calculated based on narrative samples. The HFA group demonstrated significantly higher SD of F0 and a positive correlation between the type of SFPs and SD of F0. Both groups produced a similar total number and type of SFPs. The results supported the universality of atypical intonation in ASD. The relationship between intonation and SFPs could be further explored by focusing on sentences containing SFPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the role of positional probability of syllables played in recognition of spoken word in continuous Cantonese speech. Because some sounds occur more frequently at the beginning position or ending position of Cantonese syllables than the others, so these kinds of probabilistic information of syllables may cue the locations of syllable boundaries in speech. Two word-spotting experiments were conducted to investigate the role of positional probability in the spoken word recognition process of Cantonese speech. It was found that listeners indeed made use of the positional probability of a syllable's onset but not of a syllable's ending sound in the spoken word recognition process. Together with other relevant studies in different languages, we propose that probabilistic phonotactics are one useful source of information in the spoken word recognition and speech segmentation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many research works are concentrating in how to handle the opinion mining for English, Chinese and Japanese, etc. However, little work has been done on opinion mining for Cantonese which is a world-wide influential language with 70 million speakers. In this paper, we point out that instead of utilizing the Mandarin lexical database, it's necessary to construct a particular lexical database for Cantonese. Besides, we explore some Cantonese special written-tradition rules and incorporate them into the feature-based opinion summarization system framework. The experimental results show that our framework significantly outperform the traditional Mandarin sentiment analysis method using ICTCLAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are found to co-occur in school-aged children learning Chinese, a non-alphabetic language (Wong, Kidd, Ho, & Au in Sci Stud Read 14:30-57, ). This paper examined the 'Distinct' hypothesis-that SLI and dyslexia have different cognitive deficits and behavioural manifestations (e.g., Catts, Adolf, Hogan, & Weismer in J Speech Lang Hear Res 48:1378-1396, ) in Chinese children in Primary 1. Ninety-four six- to seven-year-old Chinese children completed a norm-referenced test for oral language and for literacy, as well as cognitive tasks related to reading development. Based on results from the norm-referenced tests, 40 children fell in the typically-developing Control group, 10 children in the dyslexia-only (D) group, 19 in the SLI-only group and 25 children in the SLI-D group. Orthographic skills and lexical access and retrieval skills were found to be associated with dyslexia. Phonological memory and morphological awareness were associated with SLI. Phonological awareness was associated with both SLI and dyslexia. SLI and dyslexia in Chinese did not seem to be distinct disorders as they were both characterized by a deficit in phonological awareness. Implications for clinical practice were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gestures are commonly used together with spoken language in human communication. One major limitation of gesture investigations in the existing literature lies in the fact that the coding of forms and functions of gestures has not been clearly differentiated. This paper first described a recently developed Database of Speech and GEsture based on independent annotation of gesture forms and functions among 119 neurologically unimpaired right-handed native speakers of Cantonese (divided into three age and two education levels), and presented findings of an investigation examining how gesture use was related to age and linguistic performance. Consideration of these two factors, for which normative data are currently very limited or lacking in the literature, is relevant and necessary when one evaluates gesture employment among individuals with and without language impairment. Three speech tasks, including monologue of a personally important event, sequential description, and story-telling, were used for elicitation. The EUDICO Linguistic ANnotator software was used to independently annotate each participant's linguistic information of the transcript, forms of gestures used, and the function for each gesture. About one-third of the subjects did not use any co-verbal gestures. While the majority of gestures were non-content-carrying, which functioned mainly for reinforcing speech intonation or controlling speech flow, the content-carrying ones were used to enhance speech content. Furthermore, individuals who are younger or linguistically more proficient tended to use fewer gestures, suggesting that normal speakers gesture differently as a function of age and linguistic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, first language (L1) and second language (L2) oral language and word reading skills were used as predictors to devise a model of reading comprehension in young Cantonese-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in the United States. L1 and L2 language and literacy measures were collected from a total of 101 Cantonese-speaking ELLs during the early spring of second grade. Results show that English vocabulary and English word decoding, as measured with real and nonsense words, played significant roles in English reading comprehension. In particular, results highlight the crucial role of English vocabulary in the development of L2 English literacy skills. English listening comprehension did not predict English reading comprehension. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes the language proficiency and early literacy skills of Cantonese-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten. A total of 113 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners in Canada and the United States, composed of three subsamples from three different locations participated in this study. Results showed that on average, the Cantonese-speaking ELLs in this study performed below average on vocabulary measures when compared with monolingual norms, but at or above average on English letter-word identification and phonological awareness (PA) tasks. Cluster analysis was used to identify two new groups of children based on their language proficiency in each language: English dominant and Cantonese dominant. There were no differences on PA in English and Cantonese between the cluster groups. However, the English dominant group performed significantly higher on English vocabulary and English decoding than the Cantonese dominant group. At the same time, the Cantonese dominant group performed significantly higher on Cantonese vocabulary and Cantonese word reading than the English dominant group. Finally, multiple regression analysis revealed that there was cross-language facilitation of PA on Chinese character recognition. Educational implications and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that the 'true empty category' in Mandarin NP ellipsis is not necessarily a semantically empty structure-less position; instead it could have a complex structure, containing a referential head. Such a referential head is, however, missing in Cantonese. The dialectal variation between Mandarin and Cantonese is attributed to the noun movement parameter, which has been independently motivated in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the Dislocation Focus Construction (DFC) (also known as “Right Dislocation”) in colloquial Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) gives rise to various non-canonical word orders. In DFCs, the sentence particle (SP) occurs in a sentence-medial position. The pre- and post-SP materials are demonstrated to be syntactically connected, based on four diagnostic tests, namely (i) the zinghai ‘only’ test, (ii) the doudai (“ wh-the-hell”) test, (iii) polarity item licensing, and (iv) Principle C violations. The findings offer new insights into the syntax of the Chinese left periphery and constraints on focus movement. First, the observations entail that Chinese CPs are head-initial, and an XP is obligatorily moved around the SP to a position higher than the CP. Second, the XP-raising in the DFC is argued to be driven by focus because of the focus interpretation induced. It is discovered that the focus movement is subject to the Spine Constraint, which turns out to be remarkably similar to the properties of the Nuclear Stress Rule (e.g., selection of focus set and metrical invisibility). It is argued that the DFC is the syntactic realization of the rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the phonological awareness of 219 first, second, and fourth grade Cantonese-speaking children from the south of China, who received immersion Mandarin instruction beginning in the first grade. Children received onset, rime and tone awareness tasks in Cantonese and Mandarin. Children performed better on the Cantonese onset awareness task in grade one, but the difference disappeared in higher grades. However, their performance on the rime and tone awareness tasks was better in Mandarin. These results reflect the phonological structure of the two languages: Mandarin has a more complex onset system, whereas Cantonese has more complex tone and rime systems. Moreover, children’s phonological awareness increased faster in Mandarin, which likely resulted from Mandarin instruction. Confirmatory factor analysis suggested that onset-rime awareness is a universal construct, whereas tone awareness is a language-specific construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of a powerful preference for bisyllabicity identified in previous research on loanword truncation in Cantonese, more new forms are increasingly found which have been truncated down to a monosyllable. An examination of a 1,400-word corpus of Cantonese loanwords collected over a span of 50 years reveals a significant increase in the number of loan verbs and adjectives in more recent times, as opposed to the almost exclusive adoption of nouns previously. Verbs, as opposed to nouns, are found to be much more prone to undergoing “monosyllabic truncation.” This is found to stem from an asymmetry between nouns and verbs in the native language. A preference for monosyllabicity, particularly in the case of verbs and adjectives, is confirmed via a study of a Cantonese translation of the Swadesh word list. A further investigation of a corpus of everyday conversations uncovers lexical statistics that may have been mirrored in the truncation process. Finally, the greater readiness for the importation of verbs in more recent times is explained in terms of Haugen’s “stages of bilingualism.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angiotensin II type 2 receptor (AT2R) has been proved to be involved in a cardioprotective role, but only a few studies have addressed the association of AT2R-genotype with this role. Whether the AT2R genotype is associated with hypertension is controversial. The aim of the study was to explore the information of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the AT2R gene in Cantonese, an essential subpopulation of Chinese, and study the association of SNPs in the AT2R gene with hypertension, and to detect the genotypes that indicate a cardioprotective role. Two hundred and sixty-two patients with essential hypertension and 75 normotensive subjects were enrolled for a case-control study. All of the subjects were Cantonese. Sixteen individuals were chosen to sequence the AT2R gene and 16 SNPs were acquired. G/T rs5193 and G/A rs5194 were two SNPs in the 3′ untranslated region which were focused on the association of the AT2R-genotype and phonotype. Polymerase chain reaction was performed to amplify the fragment spanning the two SNPs. Genotype and haplotype were identified by dot blot hybridization. Four haplotypes in males (G-G, G-A, T-A, T-G) and eight haplotype combinations in females (G-G/G-G, G-A/G-A, G-G/G-A, G-G/T-A, G-G/T-G, T-A/T-A, T-G/T-G, and T-A/T-G) were detected. G-G and G-A haplotype were predominant, while T-A and T-G were rare in Cantonese. None of these was associated with hypertension. T-A carriers with essential hypertension indicated lower levels of left ventricular mass (LVM) and left ventricular hypertrophy index (LVHI). The levels of LVM and LVHI were still significantly lower in T-A carriers with hypertension adjusted for age or body mass index for men and women separately. No episodes of coronary heart disease and heart failure were detected in T-A carriers with hypertension. Haplotypes of G/T rs5193-G/A rs5194 are not associated with essential hypertension. Among these haplotypes, T-A may be implicated in a cardioprotective role to protect hypertense subjects from left ventricular hypertrophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Cantonese syllable-spotting experiment was conducted to examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), can apply in Cantonese speech segmentation. In the experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese syllable from a series of nonsense sound strings. Results suggested that listeners found it more difficult to spot out the target syllable [k$\backslash cal\; D$m[sup 1] ] in the nonsense sound strings that attached with a single consonant [tk$\backslash cal\; D$m[sup 1] ] than in the nonsense sound strings that attached either with a vowel [a:k$\backslash cal\; D$m[sup 1] ] or a pseudo-syllable [khow[sup 1] k$\backslash cal\; D$m[sup 1] ]. Finally, the current set of results further supported that the PWC appears to be a language-universal mechanism in segmenting continuous speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in a morphemic orthography such as Chinese. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic and syntactic skills in Chinese. The participants were 196 grade 1 to grade 4 Chinese children in Hong Kong. A word recognition task in Chinese was developed and children who scored in the lowest quartile were classified as poor readers. The children were administered phonological tasks (tone and rhyming discrimination), semantic tasks (choosing similar words and sentences meanings), a syntactic task (oral cloze), and a working memory task. The results showed that word recognition was highly correlated with phonological skills and semantic processing, and was only moderately related to syntactic knowledge and working memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills with the most significant problems at the phonological and semantic levels. Phonological skills are important to the acquisition of reading skills in both Chinese and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]