Language comprehension involves dynamically integrating linguistic input into coherent event representations. A common approach to investigating this process has been to examine behavioural congruency effects between linguistic and visual information. However, it remains unclear under what conditions these effects emerge and whether they reflect embodied processing or alternative cognitive mechanisms. The present study examined semantic-visual alignment of motion schema during incremental processing of Mandarin motion sentences, focusing on whether congruency effects are modulated by task demands and visual probe regions. 149 native Mandarin speakers completed either a self-paced sentence-diagram verification task or a self-paced sentence-diagram viewing task. In both tasks, participants processed segmented Chinese motion sentences, while schematic diagrams were presented either after the directional verb (e.g., jìn, ‘into’) or the landmark (e.g., bàn-gōng-shì, ‘office’). Results revealed overall congruency effects across tasks and diagram regions. Crucially, effects were stronger in the verification task than in the viewing task but remained stable across diagram regions. These findings suggest that semantic-visual alignment is sensitive to task demands but does not necessarily become stronger as the sentence unfolds. These congruency effects are open to both embodied and amodal semantic interpretations and are therefore not uniquely diagnostic of embodied processing.

Prior work has suggested that musical abilities are associated with second language (L2) learning at both segmental and prosodic levels: For example, musicians are better at encoding lexical tone or stress in an L2 than non-musicians are. However, it remains unclear how the weighting of distinct acoustic cues when producing L2 prosody may be supported by musical abilities. Our current study investigated two different sub-domains of music perception, melody and rhythm, and their link to the accurate production of English lexical stress by native Mandarin speakers, as measured by differences from native English speakers in duration, F0, and amplitude. Melody, but not rhythm perception (and controlling for other speech perception skills, including the perception of lexical stress), significantly contributed to the production of duration and was also marginally predictive of amplitude, but not F0 production. We argue that the weak or null effects of music perception on F0 production may be due to Mandarin speakers’ F0 sensitivity from their native language, which may complicate the mapping of auditory perception onto L2 speech production skills. Results suggest complex associations between music and language in learners’ use of specific acoustic cues in their production of L2 prosody.

The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by lexical tones on the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech rate, coarticulation with adjacent tones, segmental makeup, and predictability. This study shows that tonal realization is also partially determined by words’ meanings. We first show, on the basis of a corpus of Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous conversations, using a generalized additive regression model and focusing on the rise-fall tonal pattern, that after controlling for effects of speaker and context, word type is a stronger predictor of tonal realization than all of the previously established word-form-related predictors combined. Importantly, the addition of information about meaning in context improves prediction accuracy even further. We then proceed to show, using computational modeling with context-specific word embeddings, that token-specific pitch contours predict word type with 50% accuracy on held-out data, and that context-sensitive, token-specific embeddings can predict the shape of pitch contours with 40% accuracy. These accuracies, which are an order of magnitude above chance level, suggest that the relation between words’ pitch contours and their meanings are sufficiently strong to be potentially functional for language users. The theoretical implications of these empirical findings are discussed.

Although children with cochlear implants (CIs) have limited access to pitch information due to the suboptimal device transmission, durational cues are relatively well preserved, allowing for the acquisition of prosodic cues needed for communication. Recent findings show that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs can produce prosodic cues (e.g., duration and pitch) to disambiguate noun-noun compounds (e.g., xiong-mao “panda”) and lists (e.g., xiong, mao “bear, cat”), with those implanted early (before age 2) demonstrating production patterns similar to their typical hearing (TH) peers. This then raises questions about these children’s ability to perceive prosodic cues, and if early implantation again enhances their performance. These questions were investigated using a two-alternative forced-choice task with 57 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs and 66 TH peers. The results show that all preschoolers can perceive the prosodic cues needed to identify compounds but not lists, suggesting that, like English, the mapping between prosodic cues and postlexical meaning is also acquired late in children learning a tonal language. In terms of the effect of CIs, those implanted before age 2 performed as well as their TH peers. These findings suggest that preschoolers may rely more on other linguistic information rather than prosodic cues when comprehending compounds and lists, offering cross-linguistic evidence for this tendency. Furthermore, interventions for preschoolers with CIs should support the mapping of prosodic cues to discourse functions rather than just vocabulary training, improving daily communicative abilities.

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the production of wh-questions by child heritage speakers of Mandarin aged 6;9 to 16;2 years in Canada. The form of CLI addressed is wh-fronting in Mandarin object-questions (where fronting is ungrammatical) and when-questions (where fronting is dispreferred). Our goals were, first, to determine whether the children front more frequently relative to their mothers; and second, to determine the impact of structural overlap between languages (operationalized by question type), relative language dominance, and age on the rate of children’s fronting. Results show that the children front more frequently, and in more contexts, than do their mothers, indicating CLI. Structural overlap increased the likelihood of fronting for only some children, whereas greater dominance in English increased the likelihood of fronting for the group. Age did not correlate with changes in rates of fronting, indicating that CLI may sometimes reflect permanent divergence from the parental grammar.

This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ε/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments show that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghainese vs. bilingual Shanghainese-Mandarin), and crosslinguistic phonological similarity all influence the production of these vowels. These findings provide evidence for language contact as a linguistic means of merger reversal and are consistent with the view that contact phenomena originate from cross-language interaction within the bilingual mind.

This paper revisits the restrictive/appositive distinction with Mandarin relative clauses and argues against the commonly held view that their restrictive/appositive status directly correlates with their structural positions. We demonstrate that distinct uses of demonstratives constitute a relevant factor in establishing the correlation, such that the pre-/post-demonstrative position is relevant to the semantic status of a relative when the demonstrative is used deictically, but not when it is used anaphorically; and that this refined typology of RCs can be accounted for once existing analyses of strong definites (Elbourne 2005. Situations and individuals; Schwarz 2009. Two types of definites in natural language; Jenks 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 49. 501–536) are extended to Mandarin demonstratives.

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

Encoding only-type exclusive focus in discourse involves complex computation and integration of knowledge from multiple linguistic domains. We present a comprehensive analysis of syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and discourse contextual features of 864 utterances with only and its Mandarin equivalents zhi(you) produced by Mandarin–English bilingual preschoolers and matched monolinguals (age 2–6, Study 1), and by Mandarin-speaking parents (Study 2), all sampled from naturalistic interactions. The results revealed largely target-like syntactic positioning and semantic association of only and zhi(you) in both languages in the bilinguals, with cross-linguistic influence between only and zhi. Interestingly, the bilingual children, like their Mandarin monolingual peers, employed longer duration but not raised mean pitch to shift the prosodic stress to the intended focus, although both acoustic features, in addition to positional and contextual cues, were instantiated in the focus utterances in the Mandarin parental input, suggesting prolonged development in focus-prosody mapping in children independent of bilingualism.

Compounds (e.g., jellybeans) and list forms (e.g., jelly, beans) can be distinguished by the presence or absence of boundaries, marked by durational and pitch cues. Studies have shown that 5-year-olds learning English have acquired both cues for distinguishing compounds and lists. However, it is not clear how and when this ability is acquired by children speaking tonal languages, such as Mandarin. This study examined whether Mandarin-speaking preschoolers can use durational and pitch cues to distinguish compounds and lists and whether their productions are adult-like. Thirty-one 4-year-olds, 34 5-year-olds, 29 6-year-olds, and 43 adults participated in an elicited production experiment. Results showed that similar to English-speaking preschoolers, Mandarin-speaking preschoolers can use durational cues to mark boundaries, triggering appropriate pitch changes for distinguishing compounds and lists, though these were not fully adult-like, even in the oldest age group.

The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., “a dog eats a banana” vs “a dog kisses a cat”) in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time.

This study investigated the predictive use of dative verb constraints in Mandarin among home-country-raised native speakers and classroom learners (including both sequential L2 learners and heritage speakers). In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, participants made anticipatory looks to the upcoming argument (recipient versus theme) following categorical restrictions of non-alternating verbs and gradient bias of alternating verbs before the acoustic onset of the disambiguating noun. Crucially, no delay or reduction in the prediction effects was observed among L2 learners and heritage speakers in comparison with home-country-raised native speakers. Mandarin proficiency and dominant language (English versus other) did not modulate prediction effects among classroom learners. These findings provide direct support for the assumption of error-driven learning accounts of the dative alternation, that is, language users actively predict upcoming arguments based on verb information during real-time sentence processing.

The present study investigated whether children’s difficulty with non-canonical structures is due to their non-adult-like use of linguistic cues or their inability to revise misinterpretations using late-arriving cues. We adopted a priming production task and a self-paced listening task with picture verification, and included three Mandarin non-canonical structures with differing word orders and the presence or absence of morphosyntactic cues. Forty five-to-ten-year-old Mandarin-speaking children were tested and compared to adults. Results showed that children were indistinguishable from adults in how they used different cues in real-time, although their performance in offline comprehension and production was more prone to errors but improved given the increase of age. These results suggest that the current child sample has adult-like cue-use patterns and use late-arriving cues to revise misinterpretations. The observed worse offline accuracy and production difficulties relative to adults result from their less developed domain-general abilities in performing tasks.

This study investigated whether structural priming, as a reflection of error-driven learning mechanisms, could facilitate second language (L2) learning of the dative alternation in Mandarin. We sought evidence of learning from both priming and acceptability judgment data. Participants were 25 native speakers and 41 classroom learners (CLs). After a priming session in which participants predicted and then saw what a virtual partner had written to describe pictures (prime trials, with only acceptable verb-dative pairings), CLs showed increased production of these acceptable pairings and increased acceptability ratings for them. The observation of such longer-term priming effects beyond the priming phase, together with an inverse frequency effect of priming observed among the CLs, aligns well with error-driven learning accounts. However, we did not find evidence for statistical preemption, in that participants did not decrease ratings for unacceptable pairings as a result of exposure to their competing alternatives.

This article demonstrates the ambivalent sentiments of Koreans toward China as represented by the ideological construction of Hanja (traditional Chinese characters) and Chinese Mandarin embodied in Korean media. Adopting discourse analysis to examine what is described by different language ideologies, this article investigates language discourses concerning Hanja and Mandarin, locating the former mainly within linguistic nationalism and the latter within linguistic instrumentalism. This article puts forth two suggestions. First, investigating linguistic nationalism in relation to the use of Hanja not only displays negative and antagonistic attitudes toward China and the use of Hanja as an embodiment of humiliating historical experiences but also shows ambiguity, fluidity, and vulnerability of Korean national identity. Second, in contrast to Hanja, Koreans' heated enthusiasm to learn Mandarin shows their affection for China as a global market and becomes intertwined with linguistic instrumentalism, embodying an articulation of neoliberalism by reproducing structures of inequality.