Concentric - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2020

This research examined sensorimotor adaptation and aftereffect in trained vocalists and non-vocalists whose native language is Mandarin. The adaptive frequency-altered feedback paradigm involving a baseline of normal auditory feedback, a training phase of incrementally or decrementally changed feedback, and a test phase of normal auditory feedback was administered. The participants were asked to produce the sustained vowel /a/, Mandarin /ma1/ (“mother”), and Mandarin /ma2/ (“hemp”). The results show that the vocalists compensated less than the non-vocalists, suggesting that the vocalists’ audio-motor representations for pitch could be more entrenched than the non-vocalists’. All the participants displayed sensorimotor adaptation, indicating that online recalibration is an innate and automatic process. The presence of the aftereffect, however, depended on the stimulus type and vocal training experience. It appeared in all speakers’ responses to downward shift of /ma1/ and /ma2/, but only in the non-vocalists’ responses to /a/.

This study investigated how speech targets of different durations may be specified in speech plans and the release in response to startling auditory stimulus (SAS) triggering. In particular, we examined whether differentiated musical training background affects responses in terms of the preservation of duration. The results show that facilitated reaction time (RT) is only observed in SAS-induced responses shorter than 500 ms, suggesting that targets longer than 500 ms may not be as susceptible to SAS-induced rapid release. While both musically trained and untrained participants lacked accuracy in producing targets with fixed durations, they were able to differentiate syllable lengths, even though duration does not denote phonemic contrasts in Mandarin. The results also show a degree of compensation to elevated pitch level from musically trained participants, suggesting that they may have a higher sensitivity to pitch level even within a limited duration window.

Using corpus analysis and error analysis, this study investigates English-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Korean-speaking Chinese learners’ acquisition of various meanings of hai in Mandarin Chinese, including its temporal meaning ‘still, yet’ as well as its abundant atemporal meanings involving addition, comparison and counter-expectation. We found a preponderance of misselection errors across the three groups of learners. The next most common error type for the Japanese-speaking and Korean-speaking learners was omission, while omission and over-inclusion were equally challenging for the English-speaking learners. Further analysis of errors in misselection shows that many learners failed to distinguish the temporal hai from the atemporal haishi required in a concessive sentence for the counter-expectation meaning.

This study proposes an approach which derives Chinese alternative questions by means of feature percolation and LF movement. This approach is argued to fare better than a movement approach as proposed by C.-T. Huang (1998) and a non-movement binding approach as proposed by R.-H. Huang (2010) in that it may successfully explain why Chinese alternative questions are only sensitive to the wh-island constraint, but not to other types of island constraints. The LF movement analysis may receive empirical support from the observed fact that Chinese alternative questions exhibit focus-intervention effects, generally assumed to be induced by LF movement.

This paper presents a corpus-based study of a number of different types of previously undescribed constructions formed with the Tagalog noun kasama ‘companion’. Apart from independent and attributive uses, kasama frequently occurs as the predicate of an adjunct clause that can introduce a comitative participant, a semantically depictive secondary predicate, an event-oriented adjunct, or a predicative complement. The study analyses the frequency of kasama in all of these types of constructions and looks into their specific properties. This includes: the semantic distinction between additive and inclusory constructions with kasama; animacy agreement between arguments of kasama in additive constructions; variation in case marking of arguments of kasama; the preponderance of the absence of linkers – commonly known to introduce adverbial clauses in Tagalog – which are used to attach the kasama clause to the main clause; attested controllers of the kasama clause; positions available for the kasama clause in the sentence. Variation in case marking and compatibility with linkers suggests a classification of Tagalog adjunct clauses similar to that of Tagalog adverbials and prepositions. There is also some evidence to believe that kasama is being grammaticalized as a preposition. Comitative and semantically depictive constructions with kasama, which account for a quarter of the corpus sample, have never been studied before, despite the fact that Tagalog is included in several typological studies on comitative and depictive constructions.

The book under review serves as a significant contribution to the field of Trans-Himalayan linguistics. Designed as a vade mecum for readers with little linguistic background in these three languages, Nathan W. Hill’s work attempts, on the one hand, a systematic exploration of the shared history of Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese, and, on the other, a general introduction to the reader interested in obtaining an overall understanding of the state of the art of the historical phonology of these three languages. Whilst it is acknowledged that the book in question has the potential to be a solid contribution to the field, it is also felt that few minor issues can be also addressed.