Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently? Boroditsky (2001) claimed they do, but the claim did not stand in three failed replications (Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007; Tse & Altarriba, 2008). Recently she and her colleagues reported data from a different task to support the claim (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2010). We repeated their study with English speakers in US,...

This paper describes our efforts towards utilizing multilingual spoken dialogue systems as an aid to second language acquisition. We argue that it is important for language students to have the opportunity to practice communication in a non-threatening environment, something that a computer can naturally provide. We envision a three-stage interaction focused around a specific topic of a lesson ...

Background: Wild blueberries have a high content of polyphenols, but there is limited data evaluating their health benefits in adults at risk for type 2 diabetes. The objective of the study was to investigate whether consumption of 100% wild blueberry juice improves cardiometabolic biomarkers associated with type 2 diabetes risk. Methods: A single-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossove...

Previous work [1]–[5] has provided evidence that the perception of lexical tones by native speakers of Mandarin can be more categorical than that of naïve foreign listeners, for the tone pairings T1-T2, T2-T4, T1-T4 and T3-T4. The present study extended this work by testing Mandarin and naïve English listeners’ perception of all six possible pairwise combinations of the four Mandarin tones, usi...

This study investigated hemispheric lateralization of Mandarin tone. Four groups of listeners were examined: native Mandarin listeners, English–Mandarin bilinguals, Norwegian listeners with experience with Norwegian tone, and American listeners with no tone experience. Tone pairs were dichotically presented and listeners identified which tone they heard in each ear. For the Mandarin listeners, ...

This study examined the intelligibility of native and Mandarin-accented English speech for native English and native Mandarin listeners. In the latter group, it also examined the role of the language environment and English proficiency. Three groups of listeners were tested: native English listeners (NE), Mandarin-speaking Chinese listeners in the US (M-US) and Mandarin listeners in Beijing, Ch...

By some accounts, speakers of classifier languages such as Mandarin or Japanese, which lack count-mass syntax, require classifiers to specify individuated meanings of nouns. This paper examines this view by testing how Mandarin speakers interpret bare nouns and use classifier knowledge to guide quantification in four studies. Using a quantity judgment task, Study 1 found that Mandarin speakers ...

Prosodic marking of focus has been found to be typologically different in terms of existence of post-focus compression in F0 and intensity (PFC). In the current production experiments, we found that PFC showed in Mandarin, but not in Tsat (a language spoken in Hainan, China) or in Tsat-Mandarin (Mandarin spoken by Tsat people). The perception experiments further showed that focus perception in ...

Binaural hearing involves using information relating to the differences between the signals that arrive at the two ears, and it can make it easier to detect and recognize signals in a noisy environment. This phenomenon of binaural hearing is quantified in laboratory studies as the binaural masking-level difference (BMLD). Mandarin is one of the most commonly used languages, but there are no pub...