LDL | Department of Linguistics | HKU

Thomas recently presented the work with Xiaoyu, Youngah and Tungle from National Taiwan University at the 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. The study converged ratings and corpus measures for ABB words in Chinese through PCA.

The University Grants Committee has approved the use of General Research Fund this year for the following LDL projects.

Breaking down and rebuilding iconicity

Youngah will lead postdoc researchers and students in this project, which aims to understand the phonological and cognitive mechanisms behind spoken iconicity and its accessibility to a variety of language speakers, by training a neural network with ideophone corpus data to generate sound-meaning associations and test them in lab-based experiments with human participants.

Sociophonetic variation in Hong Kong and Heritage Cantonese

Jon will lead postdoc researchers and students in this project, which seeks to understand how phonological representation and sound change occur in bilingual communities. In particular, they will look at the sociophonetic variation of Cantonese sibilants among speakers of different linguistic backgrounds.

Our lab members will present their recent work at the upcoming Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language 2023 (HISPhonCog2023) in Seoul!

Jon, Ming, Ivy and Jonah will present “downloadAudiovisual enhancement in clear speech production of English laterals.” It looks at the production of laterals and other coronal consonants in normal and listener-oriented clear speech. The study involved 18 adult native English speakers who participated in a two-part speech production experiment. The findings suggest that listener-oriented speech does not necessarily prioritize auditory perceptibility. Instead, speakers may choose to provide listeners with direct visual cues of a segment’s articulatory/gestural properties, consistent with the inherently multimodal nature of speech perception.

Frank and Youngah will present “downloadBottom-up learning of a phonetic system using an autoencoder“. The study explores the ability of a machine learning model to learn a phonetic system from contextless acoustic input. The autoencoder model was trained on recordings from English and Mandarin speakers and proved successful in capturing the phonetic system of both languages. The study suggests that infants’ phonetic knowledge may not be innate but can be acquired based purely on acoustic information, without relying on language-specific learning facilities. However, the model could not reach phonological knowledge without training on phonological cues, highlighting the indispensable role of phonological information in refining learners’ knowledge on phonetics and phonology.

Changhe and Jon will present “downloadNasality and Nasal Excrescence of the Nasal Vowels in Shanghai Chinese“. It examines the acoustic and articulatory configuration of the Shanghainese nasal vowels. The study analyzed data from six native speakers of Shanghainese and found that the nasal vowels show little nasalization in the first fifth of their duration and steadily increasing nasality thereafter. The findings suggest that the Shanghainese nasal vowels are only partially nasalized, with no clear relationship between the proportion of vowel nasality and duration or presence of the nasal consonant.

Bingzi and Youngah’s study “The Transmission of Vowel Harmony and Vowel Disharmony: An Iterated Learning Study,” has recently been presented at the 2022 Annual Meeting on Phonology. The paper explores the role of a cognitive predisposition known as the substantive bias in the acquisition and transmission of phonological patterns, focusing on the asymmetry between vowel harmony and disharmony, two phonological patterns that differ in their phonetic motivation and frequency in natural languages.

Previous research has shown that learners may better acquire certain patterns over others due to their cognitive predispositions, known as inductive biases. Structural bias refers to the preference towards simpler patterns, while substantive bias refers to the tendency to more readily acquire phonetically motivated patterns. While the effect of the substantive bias on phonological learning has not always been detected, studies have constantly provided evidence for the structural bias.

The paper aims to explore the role of substantive bias during the course of language transmission. The authors used the iterated learning paradigm, which involves one or multiple participants representing one generation, who are asked to learn and replicate the target behavior from the predecessor. The output of a generation is used as the input for the next generation, and the learning procedure stays the same for every iteration. The experiment contained two conditions, the natural condition where participants learned vowel harmony patterns and the unnatural condition exhibiting vowel disharmony patterns.

The results showed no general difference between the diachronic changes of vowel harmony and vowel disharmony, indicating that both patterns are equally able to survive through long-term transmission. The experiment results are not in alignment with typological data, on which the authors noted that it might be due to the design of the transmission chain, which relied solely on learning from a single participant in each generation. The authors suggest that future work may involve interaction into the experimental paradigm to explore other potential mechanisms through which the substantive bias influences phonological transmission.

The findings suggest that while the substantive bias may play a role in phonological learning, it may not have a significant impact on language change through iterated learning, at least at the population level.

Thomas’s paper on the ABB prototype of collocate-ideophone constructions in Mandarin Chinese is now published on Cognitive Linguistics!

Van Hoey, T. (2023). ABB, a salient prototype of collocate–ideophone constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Cognitive Linguistics. open_in_new DOI file_download PDF

Bingzi is accepted to the PhD programme at MIT. Congratulations! A celebratory lunch was certainly in order.