Yiya Chen

Leiden University | LEI · Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese...

Pronunciation of words or morphemes may vary systematically in different phonological contexts, but it remains unclear how different levels of phonological information are encoded in speech production. In this study, we investigated the online planning process of Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) sandhi, a case of phonological alternation whereby a low-dipping...

Does the way a word is written influence its spoken production? Previous studies suggest that orthography is involved only when the orthographic representation is highly relevant during speaking (e.g., in reading-aloud tasks). To address this issue, we carried out two experiments using the blocked cyclic picture-naming paradigm. In both experiments...

In tonal languages such as Mandarin, both lexical tone and sentence intonation are primarily signaled by F0. Their F0 encodings are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in congruency. The present study investigated how tone and intonation, with F0 encodings in conflict or in congruency, are processed and how semantic context may affect their process...

Musical expertise is known to affect speech perception at units below clause/sentence. This study investigated whether the musician’s advantage extends to a higher and more central level of speech processing (i.e., clause segmentation). Two groups of participants (musician vs. nonmusician) were presented with sentences that contain an internal clau...

Most of the world’s languages use both segment and lexical tone to distinguish word meanings. However, the few studies on spoken word recognition in tone languages show conflicting results concerning the relative contribution of (sub-)syllabic constituents, and the time course of how segmental and tonal information is utilised. In Experiments 1 & 2...

Most psycholinguistic models of speech production agree on an earlier semantic processing stage and a later word-form encoding stage. Using a logographic language, Mandarin Chinese, Zhang and Weekes (2009) reported an early effect of orthography in a picture-word-interference study and suggested that orthography can affect speech production via a l...

Context-based predictions facilitate speech processing. However, details of predictive processing mechanisms and how factors like language experience shape facilitative processing remain debated. This electroencephalograph study aimed to shed light on these issues by investigating the effect of dialectal experience on lexical prediction. Stimulus s...

Zhushan Mandarin ( ) is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 639-3; code: cmn) spoken in the Zhushan county ( ), which belongs to the city of Shiyan ( ) in Hubei Province ( ), the People’s Republic of China. As shown in Figure 1, the county borders the city of Chongqing ( ) to the south and Shaanxi Province ( ) to the north. It has an area of 3,586 k...

Breathy phonation refers to the laryngeal setting where the vocal folds are less tense and make less contact than in "modal" phonation, which consequently leads to continuous leaking of voiceless airflow, giving rise to the perception of breathiness in a speech sound. In Austronesian languages, contrastive breathy segments are very rare. For the Au...

Lili Wu Chinese is a Wu dialect (; ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken by approximately 38,000 people who reside in the town of Lili (), one of the ten major towns in the Wujiang district. The Wujiang district belongs to the prefectural-level municipality of Suzhou city in Jiangsu province, the People’s Republic of China. It is located at the juncture are...

Fundamental frequency (f0) contours of lexical tones are a type of non-linear continuous data. Previous studies typically represent tonal f0 contours with discrete points and conduct "point-by-point" statistical analyses such as T-test and ANOVA. Such tests, however, face challenges given by the continuous and non-linear nature of f0 data. The curr...

This study examines the acoustic properties concerning tonal split and stop onsets in an under-documented Wu Chinese variety, Lili Wu, using speech production data collected from field research. Lili Wu Chinese has been reported to demonstrate an unusual tonal split phenomenon known as “aspiration-induced tonal split” (ATS). ATS refers to the disti...

One long-neglected fact in linguistic research on Standard Chinese (SC) is that most speakers of SC also speak a local dialect, which may share phonological features with SC. Tonal information can be a determinant of the phonological similarities or differences between some Chinese dialects and SC, yet relatively little empirical research has been...

Phonological similarity affects bilingual lexical access of etymologically-related translation equivalents (ETEs). Jinan Mandarin (JM) and Standard Chinese (SC) are closely related and share many ETEs, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. Using an auditory lexical decision experiment and General...

While prosodic boundaries are known to affect the acoustic realization of segments and lexical full tones, no study thus far has examined how the f0 realization of a neutral tone is influenced by different prosodic boundaries. This study set out to fill this knowledge gap by investigating the effect of prosodic boundary on neutral-tone realization...

To produce a word, a speaker needs to retrieve the semantic representation of the word and encode the phonological form for articulation. It is not precisely known yet if a word’s syntactic features (e.g. number, grammatical gender, etc.) are automatically activated and selected in single noun production. Using the picture-word interference paradig...

Tianjin Mandarin is a member of the northern Mandarin Chinese family (ISO 693-3: [cmn]). It is spoken in the urban areas of the Tianjin Municipality (CN-12) in the People's Republic of China, which is about 120 kilometers to the southeast of Beijing. Existing studies on Tianjin Mandarin have focused mainly on its tonal aspects, especially its intri...

An auditory oddball paradigm was employed to examine the unattended processing of pitch variation which functions to signal hierarchically different levels of meaning contrasts. Four oddball conditions were constructed by varying the pitch contour of critical words embedded in a Mandarin Chinese sentence. Two conditions included lexical-level word...

The blocked cyclic naming paradigm has been increasingly employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying spoken word production. Semantic homogeneity typically elicits longer naming latencies than heterogeneity; however, it is debated whether competitive lexical selection or incremental learning underlies this effect. The current study manipulate...

The present study applied functional partition to investigate disyllabic lexical tonal-pattern categories in an under-resourced Chinese dialect, Jinan Mandarin. A Two-Stage partitioning procedure was introduced to process a multi-speaker corpus that contains irregular lexical variants in a semi-automatic way. In the first stage, a program provides...

Does orthography contribute to spoken word production? Previous studies suggest that orthography is only involved in spoken word production when the orthographic representation is highly relevant, for instance, in reading aloud tasks. Using an adapted blocked cyclic naming paradigm, participants were asked to overtly name pictures that were present...

Both Standard Chinese (SC) high- and low-rising tones sound like the rising tone in Jinan Mandarin (JM) Chinese. Acoustically (Experiment 1), the JM rising tone overlaps with both SC rising tones, but more with the high-rising tone than with the low-rising tone. Perceptually (Experiment 2), the JM rising tone was more likely identified as the SC hi...

This study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and neural responses of Dutch-Cantonese (DC) bilinguals in a color-object picture naming task. Specifically, we investigated whether DC bilinguals exhibit the pho...

This study investigated the time-course of online sentence formulation (i.e., incrementality in sentence planning) as a function of the preceding discourse context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants described pictures of transitive events (e.g., a frog catching a fly). The accessibility of the agent (Experiment 1) and patient (Experimen...

This study investigates how beginner and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin process tonal information. An ABX task was adopted to investigate phonological discrimination of Mandarin tones and segment-tone integration in Dutch learners of Mandarin, with both native Mandarin and Dutch speakers (without tonal learning experience) as control groups. R...

This study investigates the extent to which prosodic cues are employed during online sentence production to distinguish three different notions of information structure (informational focus, corrective focus, and givenness) at two sentential focus locations (i.e. the subject and object positions). Participants were asked to describe pictures. The i...

Pronunciation dictionaries are usually expensive and time-consuming to prepare for the computational modeling of human languages, especially when the target language is under-resourced. Northern Chinese dialects are often under-resourced but used by a significant number of speakers. They share the basic sound inventories with Standard Chinese (SC)....

The f0 realization of lexical tones is known to vary greatly due to contextual tonal variation processes such as tone sandhi and tonal coarticulation. This study set out to investigate the f0 variability induced by these two different sources with well-controlled acoustic data from Tianjin Mandarin. Tianjin Mandarin is known for its complex pattern...

Speaking is an incremental process where planning and articulation interleave. While incrementality has been studied in reading and online speech production separately, it has not been directly compared within one investigation. This study set out to compare the extent of planning incrementality in online sentence formulation versus reading aloud a...

Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental re...

Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese; 上海话) is a Wu dialect (ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken in the city of Shanghai (CN-31), one of the four municipalities in the People's Republic of China. Over the last century, the dialect has been heavily influenced by neighbouring dialects spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, such as Jianghuai Mandarin (江淮官...

This paper studies the effect of word frequency and neighbourhood density on lexical tone merge in Dalian Mandarin. Monosyllabic words with two lexical falling tones (i.e. Tone1 and Tone 4) are produced by 60 native speakers from two different generations (middle-aged vs. young). The stimuli consist of three conditions: high neighbourhood density w...

This study investigates how beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin process Mandarin tonal information. An ABX matching to sample task is adopted to investigate the discrimination of tonal pairs, the redistribution of attention between segmental and suprasegmental information, and the integrality of segmental and suprasegmental dimensions...

The Ersu language (/ - x ò/, 尔苏语 ěrsūyǔ , ISO-639 code ers ) is spoken by approximately 16,800 people who reside in five counties in Sichuan Province (四川省) in the People's Republic of China: (i) Ganluo (甘洛县), and (ii) Yuexi (越西县) counties of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture (凉山彝族自治州), (iii) Shimian (石棉县) and (iv) Hanyuan (汉源县) counties of Ya’an...

The phonetic realisation of speech sounds depends on their context: e.g., /t/ is aspi- rated in ‘top’, but unaspirated in ‘stop’. Similarly, Beijing Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) usually has a low contour, but preceding another T3 syllablehas a rising contour (sandhiT3). Importantly, Tone 2 (T2) also has a similar rising contour. Yet how such phonetic varia...

Standard Chinese (SC) and Jinan Mandarin (JM) are two closely related Chinese tonal dialects, which share many etymologically related translation equivalents, which are usually orthographically and segmentally identical but vary in tonal similarity. The tones of most different translation equivalents are controlled by systematic correspondence rule...

Two picture–word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological processing in speech production and visual word processing. In both experiments, responses were significantly faster either when distractor and target matched in tone category, but had different overt realisations (toneme condition) or when target and distr...

Two picture–word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological processing in speech production and visual word processing. In both experiments, responses were significantly faster either when distractor and target matched in tone category, but had different overt realisations (toneme condition) or when target and distr...

Two picture–word interference experiments provide new evidence on the nature of phonological processing in speech production and visual word processing. In both experiments, responses were significantly faster either when distractor and target matched in tone category, but had different overt realisations (toneme condition) or when target and distr...

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics. Apart from European...

This study investigated how sentence formulation is influenced by a preceding discourse context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants described pictures of two-character transitive events in Dutch (Experiment 1) and Chinese (Experiment 2). Focus was manipulated by presenting questions before each picture. In the Neutral condition, particip...

How do different types of tonal variability contribute to lexical access? We addressed this question by investigating a type of variability in Jinan tonal patterns, which is lexically non-contrastive but potentially contrastive in other words. This variability was tested against three levels of variability, namely, ‘acoustic identity’, ‘within-cate...

Bilinguals of Jinan Mandarin and Standard Chinese (SC) produce different tonal variants of the same Jinan word. These words typically share the same segmental composition as their SC counterparts. Among the tonal variants, usually only one variant is identical to the tonal contour of the SC counterpart (variant_id). The word-wise probability of var...

The current study investigated the role of classifier selection in speech production in Mandarin Chinese. This study asked native Mandarin speakers to name pictures using the picture-word interference paradigm in two different tasks while measuring their electroencephalogram. Bare noun naming yielded both semantic congruency and classifier congruen...

In Standard Chinese, a low tone (Tone3) is often realized with a rising F 0 contour before another low tone; this tone change is known as the 3 rd tone sandhi. This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of the 3 rd tone sandhi in Standard Chinese in telephone conversations and broadcast news speech. The sandhi rising tone was found to be...

The Xumi 旭米 language (/ EP ʃʉ- h ĩ ket ɕɐ/ ‘the language of the Shu people’) is spoken by approximately 1,800 people who reside along the banks of the Shuiluo River (水洛河) in Shuiluo Township (水洛乡) of Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县; smi li rang skyong rdzong in Written Tibetan, hereafter, WT). This county is located in the South-West of Sic...

This Illustration focuses on the variety of the Xumi language (旭米, / LP ʂ u ket ɕɜ/ or / EP ʂ u - h ĩ ket ɕɜ/) that is spoken in the upper reaches of the Shuiluo river (水洛河) in Shuiluo Township (水洛乡) (hereafter Upper Xumi). The township is located in Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县, smi li rang skyong rdzong in Written Tibetan, hereafter, W...

L'article paraîtra dans le Journal of the International Phonetic Association, vol. 42, no. 3 (2012).

This paper investigates the tone sandhi pattern of Lianjiang (连江) dialect, a variety of East Min spoken in the Fujian province of mainland China and the Matsu (妈祖) island of Taiwan. Earlier studies on a closely related dialect (i.e. the Fuzhou 福州variety of Min) established a relatively complex set of sandhi patterns, which has become received wisdo...

This article provides an overview on segmental and tonal variations. The gap between the phonological (i.e. categorical) and physical (i.e. gradient) structure of speech in generative models has led to the development of new models. One of these models is articulatory phonology, which assumes that phonological representations consist of abstract ar...

The phonetics and phonology of consonant–f0 interaction in Shanghai Chinese were examined to further refine our understanding of consonant–f0 interaction in general. Bi-syllabic nouns, which form tone sandhi domains, were elicited within template sentences. These nouns vary in (1) lexical tone of the sandhi domain-initial syllable; (2) laryngeal co...

This study investigates the representation of allophonic tone sandhi variants in the mental lexicon, by examining how such phonological alternations are encoded during speech production. Three implicit priming experiments were designed to seek evidence from the phonological encoding of one specific allotone in Beijing Mandarin: the Low tone Sandhi...