Concentric - Volume 46, Issue 1, 2020

In this paper, the McGurk effect displayed by native Mandarin Speakers is examined in the light of reaction time (RT) and response types. Two within-subject factors, FACE and ACCENT, and one between-subject factor, English Proficiency, were incorporated in the experiment. The results showed that FACE and ACCENT, but not English Proficiency, had effects on the participants’ RT and response types. When a foreign ACCENT was dubbed onto a familiar FACE, the RT was the longest, and the McGurk effect was most likely to be found. Other kinds of McGurk stimuli composition did not receive different RT but induced different response types. When the FACE was foreign, regardless of the ACCENT, the participants tended to respond with perceptive illusion. The author concluded that the expectations of the perceiver influenced the use of multisensory integration and thus the longer RT and the appearance of the McGurk effect.

This paper discusses the origins and possible grammaticalization pathways of three agent demoting prefixes in Katripul Puyuma, ki-, m-u- and kur-. All three morphemes can attach to both nominal and verbal stems. When they attach to nominal stems, they denote the meaning of ‘get’, ‘go’, and ‘reflexive’, respectively, and when they attach to verbal stems, they express situation types that are often associated with the middle domain (Kemmer 1993). Working from the perspective of grammaticalization, this paper traces the origins and possible development of the three named morphemes, with supporting evidence drawn from cognates of other Formosan languages.

The present study investigates children’s first language acquisition of donkey sentences and bare conditionals in Mandarin Chinese, both of which are concerned with quantification. Kindergarteners, Grade 2 and Grade 4 were recruited for experimental groups, each group consisting of 18 subjects, and 18 adults comprised a control group against which to compare their interpretations. Each subject finished two Truth-Value Judgment tasks, which were sentences in isolation and sentences in context. The results of this research identified a developmental pattern regarding the acquisition of donkey sentences and bare conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. It was found that overall children under seven years of age had difficulty interpreting quantificational sentences. First, concerning the relatedness of the two constructions, all four groups showed a tendency to find donkey sentences easier to interpret than bare conditionals. With respect to contextual effects, by Grade 2, children could obtain adult-like interpretations of donkey sentences in a biasing context, but it was not until they were in Grade 4 that they could interpret both donkey sentences and bare conditionals in their supporting context with adult-like readings. As a result, the subjects’ interpretations were greatly affected by context, but the two constructions were affected in different ways.

A learner corpus, i.e., a principled collection of contextualized texts produced by second language learners, can be of invaluable help in identifying learners’ needs. Previous learner corpus research has indicated that an area for improvement in second language writing is learners’ use of logical connectors as cohesive devices. While most previous studies have been general surveys that examined a wide range of English connectors, the present one is a more focused investigation, probing into Chinese-speaking learners’ use of concessive connectors. The data is taken from a self-constructed corpus of argumentative essays written by Taiwanese freshmen, who were placed into four proficiency levels. Common errors, including orthographical, syntactic, and semantic ones, were identified and categorized. The frequency distribution of the attested concessive connectors reveals Chinese learners’ development in their use of individual connectors. Difficulties may be attributed to the linguistic complexity of concessive connectors in English and L1 transfer. Moreover, previously identified lexico-syntactic characteristics in learners’ use of English connectors were reconfirmed by our corpus data. More importantly, the pragmatic function of concessive connectors in Chinese learners’ argumentative writing is also addressed. The findings have important pedagogical implications. Pragmatics is an area in need of further attention in learner corpus research, and we have gone some way toward enhancing our understanding of that area.