The spoken word production process includes four identifiable stages: conceptualization, lexical selection, form encoding, and articulation. This dissertation studies the spoken word production process of producing Mandarin monosyllabic words, focusing on lexical selection and form encoding. The Chinese languages, including Mandarin, differ from…

This dissertation investigates the lexical f[subscript 0] control in Mandarin within the framework of Articulatory Phonology (AP) in two experiments: an imitation study (Experiment 1) and an Electromagnetic Articulography production study (Experiment 2). Empirical results are accounted for by making reference to a gestural model of f[subscript o]…

In the present day Mandarin Chinese has become a commonly taught language in the U.S. Mandarin is widely taught in colleges and universities; K-12 Chinese programs, including immersion programs, have also grown rapidly. However, to date little research has been conducted on the latter programs. This study examines immersion programs in elementary…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

Research has shown that lexical tones, a suprasegmental feature, are processed by native speakers as linguistic elements just like other segmental information. Among the four tones of Mandarin Chinese, in particular, Tone 2 and Tone 3 are very similar in their pitch contour shapes and thus can be difficult to distinguish in native and nonnative…

The relationship between speech perception and production has been debated for a long time. The Motor Theory of speech perception (Liberman et al., 1989) claims that perceiving speech is identifying the intended articulatory gestures rather than perceiving the sound patterns. It seems to suggest that speech production precedes speech perception,…

This dissertation studies the realization of the rhythm of Taiwan Mandarin and focuses on the quality of its unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables. Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is often described as more syllable-timed than Standard Mandarin (SM). In TM, the unstressed syllables occur less frequently. The quality of the unstressed (neutral-tone) syllables…

This dissertation uncovered how a group of second language (L2) students, including international and immigrant students, became socialized into American academic discourse through the writing that they did as graduate students in the context of their academic field. In particular, this study focused on Mandarin Chinese-speaking graduate students…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

How bilinguals' two languages interact with each other has stimulated considerable research. However, little of this research has focused on objective measures of speech production. This study aims to investigate bilinguals' production of Guoyu and Taiwanese voiceless sibilant fricatives to see how language contact and language dominance influence…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

What is second language fluency? What is a foreign accent? Is it possible for an adult second language learner to speak fluently with a heavy accent or vice versa? What factors contribute to the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? What acoustic attributes correlate with the perception of fluency and a foreign accent? To answer these…

The current study lays the groundwork for a model of Mandarin tones based on both native speakers' and non-native speakers' perception and production. It demonstrates that there is variability in non-native speakers' tone productions and that there are differences in the perceptual boundaries in native speakers and non-native speakers. There…

Linguistic prominence is defined as words or syllables perceived auditorily as standing out from their environment. It is explored through changes in pitch, duration and loudness. In this study, phonetic realization and perception of prominence among lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese was investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 explored…

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to analyze spoken language into its component sounds and to manipulate these smaller units. Literature review related to PA shows that a variety of factor groups play a role in PA in Mandarin such as linguistic experience (spoken language, alphabetic literacy, and second language learning), item type,…