Browsing by Author "Lai, Yuwen"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Modeling Taiwanese speakers' knowledge of tone sandhi in reduplication
(2011-01-01)
Zhang, Jie
;
Lai, Yuwen
;
Sailor, Craig
;
外國語文學系
;
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Recent studies on productivity have shown that native speakers phonological knowledge not only includes statistical patterns in the lexicon but also patterns that cannot be gleaned from the lexicon This is demonstrated in speakers analytical bias towards abstract phonological representations (Davidson 2005) single-feature dependency (Moreton 2008) perceptually motivated phonological scales (Zuraw 2007) as well as their difficulties with exceptionless opaque patterns in wug tests (Zhang and Lai 2008) Based on the results of a wug-test we show in this paper that the opaque tone sandhi pattern in Taiwanese reduplication is a case in which the speakers knowledge is a combination of more than less than and exactly what their lexicon informs them of the phonetic effects of the sandhis are overlearned the opaque tone sandhis are underlearned and the lexical statistics are properly learned We further argue that a substantively biased Maximum Entropy grammar that encodes learning biases against lexical listing and phonetically unmotivated patterns can model the simultaneous underlearning over-learning and proper learning of the lexical patterns by Taiwanese speakers (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved
Testing the role of phonetic knowledge in Mandarin tone sandhi
(2010)
Zhang, Jie
;
Lai, Yuwen
;
外國語文學系
;
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Phonological patterns often have phonetic bases. But whether phonetic substance should be encoded in synchronic phonological grammar is controversial. We aim to test the synchronic relevance of phonetics by investigating native Mandarin speakers' applications of two exceptionless tone sandhi processes to novel words: the contour reduction 213 -> 21/_T (T not equal 213), which has a clear phonetic motivation, and the perceptually neutralising 213 -> 35/_213, whose phonetic motivation is less clear. In two experiments, Mandarin subjects were asked to produce two individual monosyllables together as two different types of novel disyllabic words. Results show that speakers apply the 213 -> 21 sandhi with greater accuracy than the 213 -> 35 sandhi in novel words, indicating a synchronic bias against the phonetically less motivated pattern. We also show that lexical frequency is relevant to the application of the sandhis to novel words, but cannot account alone for the low sandhi accuracy of 213 -> 35.