Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effects of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults. Method: Speech recordings from three speakers with dysphonia secondary to phonotrauma and three speakers with healthy voices were presented to 30 healthy listeners (15 men and 15 women; M[subscript age] = 22.7 years) under…

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…

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…

This article extends Optimality Theoretic studies to the research on second language tone phonology. Specifically, this work analyses the acquisition of identical tone sequences in Mandarin Chinese by adult speakers of three non-tonal languages: English, Japanese and Korean. This study finds that the learners prefer not to use identical lexical…

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of a syntax-dependent phonological rule Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S). A Tone 3 (low dipping tone) is changed to a Tone 2 (mid rising tone) when it is followed by another Tone 3. Application of T3S in fact involves a complex process. In setting up the prosodic domains…