In Chinese, a large percentage of the vocabulary consists of compound words where exemplars in the same taxonomic category often share the same head noun (Chen & Chen, 2006; Chow, McBride-Chang, Cheung, & Chow, 2008). This structural characteristic may facilitate an early understanding of the noun taxonomy. The current study aims to investigate taxonomic development in a group of Mandarin-English speaking children in the United States. A contrast association task (i.e., "A dog is not a ____") and a category association task (i.e., "A dog is a kind of ____") were used to elicit responses from different levels of the taxonomic hierarchy (e.g., coordinates, superordinates). Participants were 25 bilingual children aged 3 to 8 and 25 English monolingual age matches. It was predicted that the bilingual group would produce more task-specific taxonomic responses (i.e., coordinates in contrast association; superordinates in category association) than their monolingual counterparts. The results, however, were somewhat opposite to this prediction. Monolinguals were found to, in general, perform better in the category association tasks and the two groups performed similarly in the contrast association task. When English vocabulary size was taken into consideration, there was no statistically significant difference between the monolingual and bilingual children on the category association task. Factors which possibly explain such a difference between the two language groups in the two tasks, or the absence of a significant difference when vocabulary size was incorporated as a covariate are discussed. / text

The overall purpose of this study is to investigate lexical semantic representation in bilinguals who speak typologically different languages, specifically, Mandarin and English. Three questions are posed about semantic representation: 1) Do bilingual speakers demonstrate greater heterogeneity in semantic knowledge than monolingual speakers; 2) To what extent do bilingual speakers use paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations to organize their semantic knowledge; and 3) What is the cross- linguistic overlap in bilingual speakers' semantic representation. Thirty Mandarin- English bilingual adults and 30 monolingual English-speaking adults participated in a repeated word association task and generated three associations to each of 36 stimuli. The bilingual speakers completed the same task in their two languages on two different days whereas the monolingual speakers responded to the same 36 stimuli on two different days. Results indicated that 1) the bilingual speakers produced a more heterogeneous set of responses in English than monolingual speakers; heterogeneity was greater in English than Mandarin among the bilingual speakers; 2) the bilingual speakers produced more paradigmatic associations (e.g., happy-sad, spoon-chopsticks, catch-throw) and fewer syntagmatic associations (e.g., happy-smile, spoon-eat, catch-ball) than the monolingual speakers; and 3) approximately 48% of the bilingual speakers' responses were cross- linguistic synonyms, whereas approximately 76% of the monolingual speakers' responses were identical from session 1 to session 2. These findings suggest that late bilinguals (second language learners) use categorical relations to organize their semantic knowledge to a greater extent than monolingual speakers and that reduced experience with a second language can lead to greater heterogeneity in semantic knowledge in that language. The findings also suggest that bilingual speakers have more distributed semantic representations than monolingual speakers. Additional research is needed to explore the areas of heterogeneity, categorical organization, and cross-linguistic overlap in order to further our understanding of bilingual speakers' semantic knowledge representation. / text

Our study investigated the processing of compound vocabulary of bilingual (BL) Mandarin-English children and their performance in comparison to monolingual (ML) English children. From this study, we sought to determine (a) how the BL children performed in Mandarin compared to English (b) how the BL children performed compared to the ML children, and (c) how background factors, such as language use and vocabulary size affect compound processing. We predicted that the BL children would show an advantage on compound processing tasks over the ML children due to the importance of compounding in word formation in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, we also used performance on picture vocabulary tasks as covariates to take into consideration potential differences in vocabulary size, as BL children often have a smaller vocabulary in each language because of distribution across languages. Data were collected from 25 BL Mandarin-English children (between 40 to 104 months of age) who were matched within three months to 25 ML English children (between 40 to 105 months of age). Children participated in a compound analogy task, in which they produced novel compounds after a model; and a compound knowledge task, in which they explained real compounds. Comparing performance across languages, results showed that the BL children demonstrated higher performance in the dominant language (English) than in the nondominant language (Mandarin). The BL children were more likely to accurately produce novel compounds, but also more likely to make errors that involved the use of compounds. No significant difference was found in BL and ML performance on compound knowledge tasks. Significant relationships were found for some of the participant characteristics for both the BL and ML children and performance. In particular, age, picture identification, and picture naming performance were correlated with compound performance for the BL participants; performance on the picture identification task and compound processing tasks were correlated with each other for the ML participants. These findings provided limited support for our hypothesis. Future investigations should include BL participants who have a more balanced proficiency in both languages, as well as examine factors that were found to influence ease of compound processing. / text

published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Science in Audiology

 This thesis focuses on a special type of construction in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese long discussed in the literature, namely resultative constructions. The interest of the study lies in the fact that resultative constructions involve an interesting mismatch phenomenon of the mapping of grammatical functions and semantic roles. Since grammatical functions and semantic roles are the building blocks of syntax and semantics, the mapping between grammatical functions and semantic roles is considered a manifestation of the syntactic and semantic interface and it is believed that the study of the mapping between them will shed light on the form and meaning association found inhuman language. However, while an adequate mapping theory can reflect how human experience or meaning is expressed in language, the mapping between grammatical functions and semantic roles is neither linear nor mutually correspondent on a one-to-one basis, rendering the nature of its mechanism obscure. In this thesis, the interface between the semantic and syntactic realizations of resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese will be investigated. The goal is to seek an optimal approach which can provide a more satisfactory account in handling mapping of Mandarin and Cantonese resultatives and explaining the special properties of the V-V structures involved in Mandarin and Cantonese resultative constructions. Drawing from the insights of previous accounts and the properties of resultative constructions, a working definition for resultatives is proposed. Through reviewing some current mapping accounts and revealing their inadequacies and limitations in handling grammatical functions and semantic roles mapping in resultative constructions in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, I am going to argue that Jackendoff’s (1990) conceptual semantics approach provides an optimal structure for the representation of resultative compounds in particular and the resultative constructions in general in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. I also want to argue that the investigation of the resultative constructions in Mandarin and Cantonese not only sheds light on the prospect of applying Jackendoff’s (1990) conceptual semantics approach to understanding other types of constructions and special phenomena in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, but also indicates a new direction of study in the possible multiple sense involved in Mandarin and Cantonese compounds. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

The present study examines the acoustic and articulatory features of English onset and coda /l/s as produced by native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers in the vowel contexts of /i/, /ɪ/, /e/, / ɛ/, /u/, /ʊ/, /o/, /ɔ/, /ɑ/, /ʌ/, /ɚ/, and /æ/, and via the elicitation tasks of word list and mini dialogue. Four Mandarin Chinese speakers who had lived in Canada for at least one year by the time of the experiment and four Canadian English speakers who were born and raised on west coast of Canada participated in the research. Both groups of speakers were the graduate students studying at the University of Victoria. The experiment took place at the Phonetics Laboratory in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria. An ultrasound machine together with a synchronized microphone was used to record the speech data for analysis. The results showed that for onset /l/, the tongue position of the Mandarin Chinese speakers was more front than that of the English speakers. For coda /l/s, Mandarin Chinese speakers had lower and more retracted tongue position than their English counterparts. ANOVA tests showed that vowel contexts and task formality had limited impact on the acoustic qualities of the onset and coda /l/s produced by both groups of speakers. The results and conclusions from the present study will contribute to a better understanding of the articulatory features of the English /l/s. Mandarin Chinese learners may also benefit from this study in that they could potentially improve their pronunciations and reduce accent. / Graduate

Not available / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Mandarin tone categories are universally thought to center on pitch information, but previous work (Berry, 2009; Brenner, 2013) has shown that pitch cues reduce in the conversational context, as do the other concurrent cues such as duration or intensity that secondarily signal tone categories. This dissertation presents two experiments (an isolated word perception experiment, and a dictation experiment) aimed at discovering how Mandarin listeners deal with these reduced cues under everyday conversational conditions. It is found that detailed spectral information is far more useful in the perception of Mandarin tones—both in isolated words and in the perception of full conversational utterances—than pitch contours, and that the removal of pitch from the recordings does not greatly influence perception of the tone categories.

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