Sound patterns in Mandarin recycling repair

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Helen KaiYun Chen (Aix-Marseille Université & The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Location: Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Date: April 20th,

The objective of the present research is to investigate the ways in which Mandarin interlocutors utilize prosodic resources as part of the means to achieve interactional actions and sequential-organization in natural conversation.  By approaches of interactional prosody and conversational phonetics toward the analysis of sound realization of Mandarin repair in natural conversation, this study provides a preliminary exploration on how the combination of detailed prosodic features forms various sound patterns in reflecting the interactional aspect and sequential organization of Mandarin conversation.

The current study examines the particular example of recycling repair, defined as “a repeat of part of a conversational turn,” among various methods used in accomplishing Mandarin same-turn self-repair.  The data corpus consists of 260 cases of recycling repair culled from a collection of both video- and audio-taped, naturally occurred Mandarin interaction.  For each recycling, acoustic measurements, including duration, pitch, silence, cut-off and lengthening were carried out by using Praat.  Additional judgments would be made based on the analyst’s impressionistic interpretation of these acoustic cues.  After taking measurements, the results were compared and the sound patterns that emerged from recyclings with the same sound manifestation were identified.

In this talk I will present 3 of the sound patterns identified, based on selected examples of Mandarin recyclings.  The findings from the current talk highlight the interaction-specific, sequence-specific, and function-specific examples of recyclings in relation to the use of the prosodic patterns.  The result from the current exploratory work on the correlation between sound patterns in Mandarin recyclings and interaction contributes significantly to an interdisciplinary study that focuses on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by paying close attention to the sound patterns in natural conversation.

Seminar on Chinese prosody

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Seminar on Chinese prosody at the LPL prosody group

Location: LPL

Date: March 20th

Helen Chen (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University / LPL, Aix-Marseille University): The conversational phonology/ interactional prosody approach to sound (prosodic) pattern(s) in Mandarin recycling repair

Yu-Ying Chuang (National Taiwan University / LPL, Aix-Marseille University): An Introduction to Pan-Mandarin ToBI

Sheng-Fu Wang (National Taiwan University / LPL, Aix-Marseille University): Tone Sandhi Group in Taiwanese

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NARRATIVE STORY-TELLING OF MANDARIN-SPEAKING PATIENTS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

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NARRATIVE STORY-TELLING OF MANDARIN-SPEAKING PATIENTS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

Hsu-Ning, Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University

(Erasmus Mundus Master currently at Università di Pisa)

• Date(s) : 21/2/2012
• Heure / time : 14h00
• Organisateur / organiser : LPL

——
The present study investigates the narrative story-telling of
Mandarin-speaking patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a
mental disease characterized by abnormalities in perception and
expression, with disorganized speech being one of its representative
characteristics. This study aims to provide a comprehensive
characterization of schizophrenic speech in Mandarin. Narrative story-
telling samples were collected from two groups of participants: the
normal control group (20 participants) and the schizophrenic group
(22 participants). Participants were asked to narrate three picture
stories: (1) the Couple Story, (2) the Old Man and the Dog Story, and
(3) the Frog Story. Narrative samples were analyzed using a Mandarin
version of Narrative Assessment Profile (NAP), a profile analysis
that was designed to evaluate discourse coherence in both typical and
atypical speakers (McCabe & Bliss, 2003). Eight dimensions of the
narrative performance were examined. They are topic maintenance,
event sequencing, reasonableness, referential skill, background
information, evaluation, conjunctive cohesion, and the narrative
pattern. In addition to the discourse level analysis, lexical choices
of specific connectives (causal connectives and contrastive
connectives) and verbal predicates (perceptual verbs, psych verbs,
and mental verbs) were computed. The study also includes an analysis
of character representation within narratives.
Schizophrenic narrators in this study had a significantly weaker
narrative performance in both discourse level and word level. Their
performance in six narrative dimensions (i.e. topic maintenance,
reasonableness, background information, evaluation, conjunctive
cohesion, and the narrative pattern) was significantly weaker.
However, they seemed to preserve an intact ability to identify basic
elements in narratives, performing comparably well in dimensions of
event sequencing and referential skill. Lexical analysis showed that
the schizophrenic group used less contrastive connectives and mental
verbs when telling their stories, echoing the findings of NAP.
Patients also demonstrated a more superficial character
representation in narratives, from which the diminishments of
language ability were related with the decline of Theory of Mind
(ToM) ability.

Slides

Phonetic variants of ethnicity, age, education and socioeconomics status in a multilingual context

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Talk given at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage on Dec 2nd, 2011.

TAN Ying Ying (Nanyang Technological University)

——
In linguistic ecologies where multiple languages co-exist and language
contact creates language variation and language change, the process of data
collection is complicated by a set of factors that will need careful
manipulation and consideration. This talk aims to highlight some linguistic
complexities that need to be considered in a multilingual context such as
Singapore, where its linguistic ecology consists of over 20 different languages
and its population almost entirely multilingual. Besides presenting an overview
of the linguistic situation in Singapore, I will also present the findings of a
few of my studies on prosody, ethnic accent perception and a sociophonetic
study of rhotics in Singapore English, and argue that there are phonetic
variants, both in production and perception, that are closely correlated to
ethnicity, age, education and socioeconomic status. Given such complexities,
one could ask what then is the possibility and feasibility of building a speech
recognition system for Singapore. And in the age where there is an increasing
need to profile speakers by the way they speak, one could also ask how these
phonetic variants will complicate matters in a multilingual context such as
Singapore. These are some of the questions that I would like to pose as future
research possibilities.

slides