NP weight effects in word order variation in Mandarin Chinese

Word Order in Mandarin Chinese and Grammatical Relations

It has been argued by LaPolla (1993, 1995) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) -among others -that word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) is (almost) exclusively determined by informational/communicative considerations. Though it cannot be denied that word order does encode informative/communicative considerations such as identifiability, foregrounding, and focalization, it is argued here ...

Minimal Word in Mandarin Chinese

Minimal Word is of unique significance in characterizing certain ProsodicMorphological phenomena. This paper explores the minimal word effect in Mandarin Chinese. It is shown that the minimal word phenomena in Chinese provide strong evidence supporting McCarthy & Prince’s minimality theorem and most importantly, as argued in this paper, that the minimal word constraint can also be extended to m...

Word frequency effects on homophonous words in Mandarin Chinese

Previous work on the effects of word usage frequency on production has found a significant correlation between the usage frequency and duration of the word. This study examines usage frequency effects on the production of homophonous words in a corpus of Mandarin Chinese, seeking to determine the validity of previous results crosslinguistically. Analysis of the corpus reveals a similar pattern ...

Null pronoun variation in Mandarin Chinese

Word Form Encoding in Mandarin Chinese Typewritten Word Production

Employing the implicit priming task, we examined whether Chinese words that shared the initial onset consonant could be typed, using the phonetic-based method (called zhuyin), with faster response times than words that did not share the initial onset consonant. We also examined the effect of sharing the initial tonal syllable. A significant onset preparation effect and a significant syllable pr...