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This paper reports an empirical study investigating the effects of extensive reading on vocabulary uptake, and speed of word access, among of Chinese high school students using English as a second language. It builds on a study by Masrai & Milton (2018) which reported that an informal program of watching the news on TV and reading subtitles, carried out outside class, could result in significant and measurable improvements in both orthographic vocabulary size and speed of lexical access. This study investigates whether these findings can be repeated with learners from a different L1 background, and reading process background, and where the vocabulary noticing focus of the intervention is removed. The participants were given tests of written vocabulary size, aural vocabulary size, and reading speed. These tests were conducted before and after a six-week intervention which involved reading current news materials. The results showed an increase in reading speed which is assumed to indicate an improvement in the speed of lexical access, but no obvious growth in vocabulary size. It is suggested that this is a learning method which can help facilitate Chinese students' ability to acquire their second language ability in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of lexical grammar and gaze in three televised confession news segments discussing national identity shown on PRC state-backed media in 2016. It aims to apply discourse analysis methodologies previously used to study PRC mass media (Fang 1994, Fang 2001, Feng 2013, Feng 2016, Renwick and Cao 1999) to subject matter previously researched mainly in other disciplines (Leung 2017, Fiskesjö 2017, Sorace 2019, Dahlin 2018). Following multimodal analysis of lexical grammar and gaze patterns, social identity theory is applied to understand narrative messaging similarities across the three segments. By applying the methodologies of discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, and social identity theory to a heretofore neglected topic, the study aims to better understand this phenomenon and to determine what methodological adjustments might be necessary in its investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentence context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours are important factors to speech perception and comprehension. In Chinese-Mandarin, lexical tones can be distinguished by the F0 contours. Previous studies found healthy people could use the cue of context to recover the phonological representations of lexical tones from the altered tonal patterns to comprehend the sentences in quiet condition, but can not in noise environment. Lots of research showed that patients with schizophrenia have deficits of speech perception and comprehension. However, it is unclear how context and F0 contours influence speech perception and comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. This study detected the contribution of context and lexical tone to sentence comprehension in four types of sentences by manipulating the context and F0 contours in 32 patients with schizophrenia and 33 healthy controls. The results showed that (1) in patients with schizophrenia, the interaction between context and F0 contour was not significant, which was significant in healthy controls; (2) the scores of sentences with two types of sentences with flattened F0 contours were negatively correlated with hallucination trait scores; (3) the patients with schizophrenia showed significantly lower scores on the intelligibility of sentences in all conditions, which were negatively correlated with PANSS-P. The patients with schizophrenia couldn't use the cue of context to recover the phonological representations of lexical tones from the altered tonal patterns when they comprehend the sentences, inner noise may be the underlying mechanism for the deficits of speech perception and comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in Chinese students’ academic writing across different levels of studies at an English medium university. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at four points of time between Year 1 and Year 4, and the structures and functions of the bundles were analysed to reveal the developmental patterns in bundle use. The analysis shows that, overall, students used more types of bundles when they progressed to the higher level of studies, but there were differences in the use of preferred structural forms. The analysis also suggests a developmental order of bundle use in L2 students’ academic writing: clausal and nominal bundles appeared to be acquired prior to prepositional bundles. In terms of functional distributions, discourse organizing bundles were much more prevalent than stance and referential expressions in student writing at all levels of studies, particularly in final year project dissertations. The findings indicate a linkage between levels of academic studies and the patterns of bundle use in student writing, as well as the effects of EAP instruction on the learning of lexical bundles by Chinese student writers at an English medium university in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Because of limited spectral resolution, Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant (CI) users have difficulty perceiving fundamental frequency (F0) cues that are important to lexical tone recognition. To improve Mandarin tone recognition in CI users, we implemented and evaluated a novel real-time algorithm (C-tone) to enhance the amplitude contour, which is strongly correlated with the F0 contour.Methods: The C-tone algorithm was implemented in clinical processors and evaluated in eight users of the Nurotron NSP-60 CI system. Subjects were given 2 weeks of experience with C-tone. Recognition of Chinese tones, monosyllables, and disyllables in quiet was measured with and without the C-tone algorithm. Subjective quality ratings were also obtained for C-tone.Results: After 2 weeks of experience with C-tone, there were small but significant improvements in recognition of lexical tones, monosyllables, and disyllables (P < 0.05 in all cases). Among lexical tones, the largest improvements were observed for Tone 3 (falling-rising) and the smallest for Tone 4 (falling). Improvements with C-tone were greater for disyllables than for monosyllables. Subjective quality ratings showed no strong preference for or against C-tone, except for perception of own voice, where C-tone was preferred.Discussion: The real-time C-tone algorithm provided small but significant improvements for speech performance in quiet with no change in sound quality. Pre-processing algorithms to reduce noise and better real-time F0 extraction would improve the benefits of C-tone in complex listening environments.Conclusions: Chinese CI users' speech recognition in quiet can be significantly improved by modifying the amplitude contour to better resemble the F0 contour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a megastudy approach, we developed a database of lexical variables and lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character compound words. Each word was responded to by about 33 native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. This resource provides a valuable adjunct to influential mega-databases, such as the Chinese single-character, English, French, and Dutch Lexicon Projects. Three analyses were conducted to illustrate the potential uses of the database. First, we compared the proportion of variance in lexical decision performance accounted for by six word frequency measures and established that the best predictor was Cai and Brysbaert's ( PLoS One, 5, e10729, 2010) contextual diversity subtitle frequency. Second, we ran virtual replications of three previously published lexical decision experiments and found convergence between the original experiments and the present megastudy. Finally, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the effects of theoretically important lexical variables in our normative data. This is the first publicly available large-scale repository of behavioral responses pertaining to Chinese two-character compound word processing, which should be of substantial interest to psychologists, linguists, and other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a general tendency to treat heritage language (HL) learners as if they formed a single unitary group with shared linguistic and print experiences. In actuality, however, HL learners vary widely in their early oral and print experiences at home or in other social contexts and as a result, they develop vastly different skills in both oral language and literacy skills. The study aimed to investigate the effect of early oral and print input on later reading development among Chinese as heritage language (CHL) learners. Seventy-three college-level CHL learners who participated in this study completed an early language background questionnaire and a series of reading measures inclusive of print vocabulary knowledge, lexical inferencing ability and reading comprehension. The results found that early language input was significantly related to later reading development. Critically, the study identified the significant factors of language experiences predicting later reading skills. Oral language input at home and print input in CHL schools were found to jointly contribute to the later development of word-level abilities while print input at home predicted later reading comprehension skill among CHL learners. The findings suggest that early oral and print language input at home and in CHL schools could have longitudinal effects on later reading skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of spoken picture naming using event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that speakers initiate lexical access within 200ms after stimulus onset. In the present study, we investigated the time course of lexical access in written, rather than spoken, word production. Chinese participants wrote target object names which varied in word frequency, and written naming times and ERPs were measured. Writing latencies exhibited a classical frequency effect (faster responses for high- than for low-frequency names). More importantly, ERP results revealed that electrophysiological activity elicited by high- and low frequency target names started to diverge as early as 168ms post picture onset. We conclude that lexical access during written word production is initiated within 200ms after picture onset. This estimate is compatible with previous studies on spoken production which likewise showed a rapid onset of lexical access (i.e., within 200ms after stimuli onset). We suggest that written and spoken word production share the lexicalization stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the South East Asia Mandarin-English corpus, a 63-h spontaneous Mandarin-English code-switching transcribed speech corpus suitable for LVCSR and language change detection/identification research. The corpus is recorded under unscripted interview and conversational settings from 157 Singaporean and Malaysian speakers who spoke a mixture of Mandarin and English within a single sentence. About 82 % of the transcribed utterances are intra-sentential code-switching speech and the corpus will be release by LDC in 2015. This paper presents an analysis of the code-switching statistics of the corpus, such as the duration of monolingual segments and the frequency of language turns in code-switch utterances. We also summarize the development effort, details such as the processing time for transcription, validation and language boundary labelling. Lastly, we present textual analyses of code-switch segments examining the word length of monolingual segments in code-switch utterances and the most common single word and two-word phrase of such segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Based on the statistical methods of corpus and the 124 love-songs of Tshang yang Gya tsho as the studying object, this paper have set up the principles of vocabulary segmentation and built the love-songs corpus of Tibetan and Tibetan-Chinese grammar separation lexicon corpus. Then it did quantitative research on the achievement of “love-songs” in the language arts from three aspects: the length of the vocabularie''s, the frequency rate of the vocabularies, and the distribution of the term''s number in the verses and the songs. In addition it also introduced a new kind of researching idea and method for the study of Tibetan literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study investigates pragmatic transfer in persuasion strategies by Chinese learners of English. The subjects of the study include ten native English speakers, ten Chinese learners of English and ten native Chinese speakers. All of them are university students. The classification of persuasion strategies is mainly based on Hardin's classification of lexical and pragmatic realization of persuading speech act. The data is collected by means of a discourse complete test questionnaire The Chi-square test is used to compare frequencies of use of persuasion strategies by the Chinese learner of English group, the native English group and the native Chinese group. Results indicate that although all three groups use complaint strategy most frequently and opting out strategy least frequently, the Chinese learner of English group displays advice/suggestion/recommendation strategy more frequently than the native English group. The Chinese learner of English group also uses opinion-proving strategy less frequently than the native English group and never uses consolation/ condolence strategy. Such pragmatic transfer is transferred from Chinese culture and Chinese thinking pattern, which provides pedagogical implication for language teachers to develop Chinese students' English pragmatic competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An integrative lexical analysis mechanism is proposed in order to solve the limitation of mostly existing lexical analysis system with "pipelining" mechanism. Based on maximum matching and second-maximum matching (MMSM) model, in the directed graph built by MMSM model, candidate words, parts-of-speech (POS) tags and all the candidate unknown words are added and considered, hidden Markov model (HMM) is extended, so Chinese word segmentation, ambiguity resolution, unknown word recognition and POS tagging are solved synchronously. The integrations of word segmentation and POS tagging, unknown words recognition and known word segmentation, uncertain unknown words recognition are realized. All the tasks of lexical analysis are accomplished synchronously, the conflicts between all the tasks in the Chinese lexical analysis are avoided, and high precision can be gained. The open test indicates that the F-score of the system is 98. 03 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Transposed-letter effects happen on high- but not low-frequency L2 words. • Low-proficient L2 users use letter-to-letter strategy to read low-frequency words. • Fine-grained orthographic route is not well set up for high-proficient L2 users. • L1 and L2 users follow a similar path in developing visual word recognition skills. • Lacking spoken vocabulary and supervision slow down L2 user's reading development. The present study examined the orthographic processing of English visual word recognition in adult Chinese-speaking English learners under the framework of the multiple-route model of reading development. Two groups of adult learners with high and low English proficiency finished a forward-masked lexical decision task. The results showed a complicated scenario on transposed-letter effects, implying that the late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals with low English proficiency still needed to adopt a letter-to-letter reading strategy, and that the L2 users with high English proficiency also had not properly developed the fine-grained orthographic route even they had a long experience of English learning in the foreign language learning settings in China. Overall, it is suggested that late unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals generally follow a path similar to that of native readers in acquiring English visual word recognition skills developed from the letter-to-letter reading strategy to the parallel orthographic processing strategies. However, since L2 users usually have no or limited spoken vocabulary of English before accessing printed words and inadequate supervision in developing L2 word reading skills, their development would be much slower than that of English native speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]