As the most commonly established and attested language contact phenomenon, loanwords, also known as lexical borrowings, may undergo transformations when borrowed from the source language (SL) to the borrowing language (BL). Previous studies have separately illustrated the role of perception and phonology in the borrowing process. However, the…

Most children learn a language such as Mandarin Chinese that uses lexical tone to communicate meaning. This study aimed to examine the phonological specificity of tone representations in monolingual and bilingual learners of Mandarin. Two age-groups were tested: toddlers (2.5 to 3.5 years) and preschoolers (4 to 5 years; N = 80). Using a…

Purpose: It has been reported that tone language-speaking children with autism demonstrate speech-specific lexical tone processing difficulty, although they have intact or even better-than-normal processing of nonspeech/melodic pitch analogues. In this early efficacy study, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of Auditory-Motor Mapping Training…

Compared with the study of acquisition of syntax and morphology, there is a relative lack of research on the acquisition of phonology, the L2 acquisition of word stress in particular. This paper investigates the production of word stress by 70 Chinese college students in their reading aloud. Altogether 350 minutes' recordings were collected and…