The Effects of L1 Singapore Mandarin on L2 Singapore Hokkien

Regional Chinese in Contact

Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than homeland (monolingual) speakers. For example, Wei and Lee (2001, p. 359), a study of British-born Chinese-English bilingual children’s morphosyntactic patterns (including classifier use), report “evidence of delayed and stagnated L1 development.” However, many studies compare heritage speaker performance to a prescriptive standard rather than to spontaneous speech from homeland speakers. We compare spontaneous speech data from two generations of Heritage Cantonese speakers in Toronto, Canada, and from Homeland Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Both groups are similar in a strong preference for general and mass classifiers, and classifier choice being primarily governed by the noun’s number. We observe specialization of go3 個 to singular nouns, a grammaticalization process increasing with each generation. The similarity between homeland and heritage patterns replicates previous studies utilizi...

The paper examined the attitudes of Hokkien speakers towards their vernacular language and Mandarin. The participants for the study were 50 students at a Malaysian university in Kuching, Sarawak who were of Hokkien parentage and spoke Hokkien. Data collected using the matched-guise technique were analyzed using a paired t-test to investigate whether the participants" attitudes towards these two languages were significantly different. The results showed that Mandarin was ranked significantly higher than Hokkien on both status and solidarity dimensions. The study revealed that, based on the participants" subconscious reactions to selected traits examined in the matched-guise technique, participants with a strong Hokkien identity are likely to perceive Hokkien speakers as less educated, having less leadership skills and more humorous than Mandarin speakers. As a group, the participants were found to have closer affinity to Mandarin speakers. The findings have implications on language maintenance efforts of speech communities concerned with diminished affiliation of the younger generation with vernacular languages.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

While the study of classifiers in Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese has been discussed extensively in the literature, there are also key differences in the classifiers between Singapore Mandarin Chinese and other varieties of Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, such as Mainland China Mandarin Chinese. Yet, classifiers in Singapore Mandarin Chinese have been minimally explored. With a corpus-based approach, involving both the written and spoken data sampled from Singapore Mandarin Chinese, this study aims to carry out a comprehensive and systematic investigation of the classifiers in Singapore Mandarin Chinese, and thereafter compare the classifiers between the (a) written and spoken data of Singapore Mandarin Chinese, and between (b) Singapore Mandarin Chinese and Mainland China Mandarin Chinese. In addition, this study will also look into the "adjective+classifier" adjectival phrase structure in Singapore Mandarin Chinese. The findings of this study will not only serve as an important reference for future studies of Singapore Mandarin Chinese classifiers, but also contribute to the theoretical discussion on classifiers in general and language variation and change.

BUCLD 39 Proceedings, 2015

Native (L1) speakers take advantage of prenominal cues, such as gender-marked articles and classifiers, to identify an upcoming noun during online processing (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Huettig et al., 2010). The extent to which non-native (L2) speakers are able to do so remains a topic of on-going investigation. Findings from learners of gender-marking languages have not been entirely consistent, and point to the influence of a number of language- and learner-specific factors, as discussed in more detail below. No previous findings from L2 learners of classifier languages are available, as far as we know. The goal of the present study is to extend research on the facilitatory effect of prenominal cues in the online processing of an L2 by looking at classifiers in Chinese, which are both similar and different along potentially relevant dimensions from gender-marked articles in Indo-European languages. We report the findings from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese, closely following the procedures and design of Lew-Williams and Fernald’s (2007, 2010) work on the processing of gender-marked articles in L1 and L2 Spanish.

International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, 2015

This research is aimed at studying classifiers in Lao and the cognitive process of Lao native speakers reflected by their usage of classifiers. The scope of the study is limited to classifiers in standard Lao (Vientiane dialect). The total number of informants involved in the study is 90. The researchers analyze the attributes of prototypical nouns and non-prototypical nouns to highlight the relationship between them. The analysis is based on the prototype theory, attributes in categorization and idealized cognitive models (ICMs). The results indicate that the Lao classifier system works on some kinds of general principles like in earlier studies by Dyirbal and Thai. However, the study shows that the cognitive system of Lao people is influenced by their own geographic and cultural factors as well as their religious beliefs. The study also shows the cognitive system of Lao people which is different from others, even in Thai, which is the member of the same language family (Tai-Kadai).

TAL2018, Sixth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, 2018

This study makes use of diverse acoustic features to comprehensively examine the effects of native language (L1) experience, tonal context, segmental context (consonant aspiration type and vowel height), and the intrinsic phonetic similarity on the perception of Mandarin tones by Thai and Indonesian speakers. Two perception tasks which are fouralternative forced-choice identification tests for stimuli presented in isolation and carrier sentences were conducted. Results showed that Thai listeners performed significantly better than Indonesian counterparts in both identification tests and the assertion of tonal language speakers having advantages over the non-tonal L1 speakers in acquiring a new tonal language was supported in this study. However, both groups share some similar error patterns which might be due to the intrinsic phonetic similarity between the target tones. The effect of segmental context appeared to be not significant, while the tonal context was found to exert contrary effect on Thai and Indonesian listeners.

Given the historical and linguistic contexts of Singapore, it is both theoretically and practically significant to study Singapore Mandarin (SM), an important member of Global Chinese. This paper aims to present a relatively comprehensive linguistic picture of SM by overviewing current studies, particularly on the variations that distinguish SM from other Mandarin varieties, and to serve as a reference for future studies on SM. This paper notes that (a) current studies have often provided general descriptions of the variations, but less on individual variations that may lead to more theoretical discussions; (b) the studies on SM are primarily based on the comparison with Mainland China Mandarin; (c) language contact has been taken as the major contributor of the variation in SM, whereas other factors are often neglected; and (d) corpora with SM data are comparatively less developed and the evaluation of data has remained largely in descriptive statistics.

2009