Splendid! This volume, with its timely topic, reputable editors, and outstanding contributors, not only fills an existing gap but also breaks new ground in the comparative study of language disorders.

The authors of this volume have succeeded in organizing a diverse array of material into a contemporary and highly readable text for clinicians and researchers everywhere about language disorders in speakers of Chinese.

Sam-Po Law is an Associate Professor at the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. She was trained in developmental psychology and linguistics. Her research interests in Chinese language disorders include acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia, lexical and sentence processing deficits, and language rehabilitation of individuals with aphasia.

Brendan Weekes is an experimental psychologist who studies the psychology of language and memory – specifically word recognition and recall. He examines cognitive processes using cross-linguistic, neuropsychological and brain imaging methods. His research can be applied to understanding problems in clinical neuropsychology including bilingual aphasia, dementia and reading difficulties.

Anita Wong is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. A speech-language pathologist by training, she has worked with English- and Chinese-speaking children with developmental speech and language disorders. Her current research interests include the early identification of language impairment, and the underlying linguistic and cognitive deficits in Cantonese-speaking children with SLI.

Language Disorders in Speakers of Chinese

By Sam-Po Law, Brendan S. Weekes, Anita M-Y Wong

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Sam-Po Law, Brendan S. Weekes and Anita M-Y. Wong and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-116-3

Contents

Contributors, vii,
Preface, xi,
1 Characteristics of Chinese in Relation to Language Disorders Roxana S-Y. Fung, 1,
2 The Role of Phonological Saliency and Phonological Template in Typically and Atypically Developing Phonology: Evidence from Putonghua-speaking Children Hua Zhu, 19,
3 Grammatical Characteristics of Mandarin-speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment Hintat Cheung, 33,
4 A Construction Account of Question Acquisition in Cantonese-speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment Anita M-Y. Wong and Stephanie F. Stokes, 53,
5 Morphosyntactic Deficits in Cantonese-speaking Children with Specific Language Impairment Paul Fletcher, Laurence B. Leonard, Stephanie F. Stokes and Anita M-Y. Wong, 75,
6 Assessing Cantonese-speaking Children with Language Difficulties from the Perspective of Evidence-based Practice: Current Practice and Future Directions Thomas Klee, Anita M-Y. Wong, Stephanie F. Stokes, Paul Fletcher and Laurence B. Leonard, 89,
7 Morphological Deficit and Dyslexia Subtypes in Chinese Sina Wu, Jerome L. Packard and Hua Shu, 112,
8 Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese: Behavioral, Genetic and Neuropsychological Issues Kathrin Klingebiel and Brendan S. Weekes, 138,
9 Lexical Tones Perceived by Chinese Aphasic Subjects Jie Liang, 169,
10 Selective Grammatical Class Deficits: Implications for the Representation of Grammatical Information in Chinese Zaizhu Han and Yanchao Bi, 184,
11 Acquired Reading Disorders in Chinese: Implications for Models of Reading Brendan S. Weekes, I Fan Su and Wengang Yin, 200,
12 Age of Acquisition Effects on Picture Naming in Chinese Anomia Sam-Po Law, Brendan S. Weekes, Olivia Yeung and Karen Chiu, 222,
13 The Effect of Semantic Integrity of Words with Preserved Lexico-phonological Representation on Verbal Recall Winsy Wong and Sam-Po Law, 240,
14 Cantonese Linguistic Communication Measure (CLCM): A Clinical Tool for Assessing Aphasic Narrative Production Anthony Pak-Hin Kong and Sam-Po Law, 255,
15 A Semantic Treatment for Cantonese Anomic Patients: Implications for the Relationship Between Impairment and Therapy Sam-Po Law, Winsy Wong and Elva Wong, 273,
16 Acquired Dyslexia in Mongolian and Chinese Brendan S. Weekes, I Fan Su and Wengang Yin, 293,

CHAPTER 1

Characteristics of Chinese in Relation to Language Disorders

ROXANA S-Y. FUNG

Introduction

The Chinese language, or group of related languages, is the most widely spoken language in the world. Over a billion people, about one sixth of the world’s population, speak some form(s) of Chinese as their native language. The spoken forms of the Chinese language exhibit a high degree of diversity to such an extent that its geographical variants may not be mutually intelligible. However, the Chinese language is still regarded as a single language by the Chinese people mainly due to the same written form shared by all the geographical variants. There are seven major geographical dialect groups (each with many subdialects): (1) Mandarin (which has over 870 million speakers living across the Northern, Central and Western regions of China), (2) Wu (speakers of which are most commonly found in Jiangsu and Zhejiang including Shanghai), (3) Xiang (in Hunan), (4) Gan (in Jiangxi), (5) Yue (in Guangdong), (6) Min (in Fujian), and (7) Kejia (in Guangdong and other Southern Chinese provinces). The standardised form of modern spoken Chinese in Mainland China as well as in Taiwan is Putonghua (also referred to as Mandarin) of which the phonology is based mainly on Beijing Mandarin and the grammar loosely on the subdialects of Northern China. Cantonese, which has over 110 million speakers, is the most influential variety of Chinese other than Mandarin (Matthews & Yip, 1994). It is the standardised form of the Yue dialect group spoken in the Southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in many overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia and in the Western world. Thus, most studies of Chinese language disorders involve mainly Mandarin or Cantonese speakers.

It is traditionally believed that Chinese dialects differ from each other mostly in matters of pronunciation and vocabulary and they exhibit the greatest degree of uniformity in matters of grammar. Thus, Chao (1968) claimed that there was practically one universal Chinese grammar. However, more and more recent studies question the validity of this long-held claim. In light of the topics of other chapters in this book, this chapter will not discuss in detail the grammatical differences between Mandarin and Cantonese. Rather, it aims to highlight some characteristics of these two dialects that are related to language difficulties that have been investigated by contributors of this volume. The brief review here will provide the readers with sufficient background on the grammar of Mandarin and Cantonese and the Chinese writing system to appreciate the findings and analyses presented in subsequent chapters. Readers who are interested in learning more detailed accounts of these two dialects may consult Chao (1968) for Mandarin grammar, Matthews and Yip (1994) for Cantonese grammar and Liu (2001) for descriptions of significant typological differences between these two Chinese variants.

Phonology

Phonologically, Mandarin has 22 consonants and 12 vowels, whereas Cantonese has 17 consonants and 11 vowels. An overview of the phonological inventories of Mandarin and Cantonese is shown in Table 1.1. Note that Hanyu Pinyin is adopted as the standard romanisation of Mandarin, whereas Jyutping, developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, is adopted as that of Cantonese in this book.

Compared with other languages, such as English, the syllabic structure of Chinese is relatively simple. A syllable in Chinese is usually depicted by the following form: (C)V(C). Consonant clusters are not permitted in a Chinese syllable. The tone and the nuclear vowel (or vocalic segment) are the two obligatory elements in a syllable, whereas the syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants are optional. In Mandarin, all consonants in the inventory except [D] can be the onset of a syllable. However, the coda is restricted to [n] and [D] only The syllable nucleus can be a monophthong such as [a], a diphthong such as [ai] or a triphthong such as [uai]. In Cantonese, all consonants in the inventory can be the onset of a syllable. It has a rich coda inventory compared with Mandarin. In addition to the nasal consonants [m], [n] and [D], unreleased oral stops [p], [t], [k] can also be the coda of a syllable. The nucleus is usually a monophthong such as [a] or a diphthong such as [ai]. In addition, the two nasal sonorants [m] and [n] can serve as the nucleus and form a syllable totally on their own.

Chinese is a tone language that employs pitch change to contrast lexical meanings. All geographical variants of Chinese are tonal, but they differ in the number of tones they have. As shown in Table 1.2, Mandarin has four basic tones and one neutral tone, whereas Cantonese has six distinct tones without the occurrence of neutral tone.

The neutral tone in Mandarin, also referred to as the fifth tone or the zero tone, is the reduced form of any full-fledged tone. It is produced in a lighter, shorter and less stressed manner. The exact pitch of the neutral tone depends almost entirely on the tone carried by the syllable preceding it. Many grammatical words/morphemes in Mandarin have been assigned the neutral tone.

In Mandarin, tone sandhi takes place in connected speech. A syllable has one of the tones when it stands alone, but the same syllable may take on a different tone without a change of meaning when followed by another syllable. The most important tone sandhi in Mandarin involves the juxtaposition of two third tone syllables. The dipping third tone changes to a rising second tone when followed by another third tone. Although there are tone changes in Cantonese, they are not tone sandhi as in Mandarin. Tone changes in Cantonese are not triggered by phonological environments, but are motivated by a number of morphological and semantic factors. For example, the noun g? pei means ‘skin’ when pronounced in the fourth tone, its citation form, but ‘leather’ when pronounced in the second tone, the changed tone.

As Packard (1993) points out, the set of possible syllable structures in Chinese is small given the structural simplicity and a small inventory of phonemes. There are only about 1200 and 1600 distinct syllables in Mandarin and Cantonese, respectively, even taking into account different tones in the two dialects. Almost all syllables are possible words and the occurrence of homophones is extensive in Chinese.

The phonological development of normally and atypically developing Mandarin-speaking children is presented in Chapter 2 by Zhu. The author explains the unique developmental patterns observed by taking an approach combining two concepts, phonological saliency and phonological template. A new paradigm for cross-linguistic research in speech disorders is also introduced. Focusing on lexical tone perception, in Chapter 9 Liang studies tone impairments in Mandarin adult speakers subsequent to brain injury. Questions concerning whether phonological encoding is modality-specific or not and whether the nature of tone disruption is related to structural deficits or processing limitations are addressed.

Grammar

The word

Chinese is often referred to as an analytic language because it possesses very little inflectional or derivational morphology. Additionally, Chinese is often described as an isolating language. However, this description applies to Classical Chinese but not modern Chinese. Classical Chinese is a perfect example of an isolating language because most words in Classical Chinese consist of one single morpheme and each morpheme corresponds to one single syllable. Whereas morphemes in modern Chinese are predominately monosyllabic, most words are no longer monosyllabic. Content words, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives in modern Chinese are largely disyllabic and bimorphemic. There are three main means by which words are formed in Chinese: affixation, reduplication and compounding. As there are few inflectional or derivational affixes in Chinese, compounding is the most productive means of word formation in modern Chinese. It is a process of forming a single new word by combining two or more morphemes. By studying the internal composition of Chinese compound words, five major types of syntactic/semantic relation between the component morphemes are identified. These are listed and illustrated in Table 1.3.

It should be noted that the internal relation of a compound is not always clear because some compounds are fully lexicalised and their meanings are not predictable from their components. For example, it is not clear how the meaning of the adjective [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] da4 fangl ‘generous’ is related to the two component morphemes ‘big’ and ‘square’. Hence, the internal relation of this adjective cannot be determined.

Given the paucity of inflectional morphology, there is no change in word form in Chinese to mark person, gender, case, number (obligatorily expressed only for pronouns), tense or mood. Moreover, there is no formal distinction between a finite and an infinite verb. Chinese also lacks formal markers for parts-of-speech. To assign part-of-speech to a word on the basis of its surface form only is not an easy task. A sharp distinction between nouns, verbs and adjectives, in particular, is difficult to draw. For instance, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] dai4biao3 is a noun in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] wo3men0 deO dai4biao3 ‘our representative’, but a verb in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] dai4biao3 ivo3men0 ‘represent us’. Furthermore, the noun kelxue3 ‘science’ shares the exact same surface form with its derived adjective as in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] hen3 ke1xue3 ‘very scientific’. However, despite the absence of overt markers, many Chinese grammarians have tried to define Chinese parts-of-speech on the basis of syntactic distribution. A word is considered a noun if it can be modified by a demonstrative/numeral measure phrase, but cannot be negated by the adverb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] bu4 ‘not’. On the contrary, adjectives and verbs are words that can be negated by bu4. Adjectives are further distinguished from verbs by another adverb [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] hen3 ‘very’. Most adjectives can be modified by hen3, but verbs proper cannot. Although there is a group of verbs denoting psychological activities that can be modified by hen3, they are all transitive. That is to say, psychological verbs can take an object noun phrase (NP) but adjectives cannot.

The productivity of compounding in Chinese and the extent of homophony in the language render compound words an ideal context for investigating the relationship between morphological deficits and developmental dyslexia. This is examined by Wu, Packard and Shu in Chapter 7. Despite the fact that distinctions among major word classes, such as nouns and verbs, in Chinese cannot be made as clearly as in Indo-European languages, dissociation in production between these grammatical classes has nonetheless been reported. Case studies of double dissociation of selective impairment to nouns versus verbs are reviewed in Chapter 10 by Han and Bi. Furthermore, given that compound words of one form class can be composed of components of a different word class, as illustrated by the examples in Table 1.3, Han and Bi also examine previous reports of grammatical class deficits at the sublexical level.

Classifiers

Many languages have measure words for noun phrases. Taking English as an example, there is a group of measure words that express the length, weight and volume of an object, such as ‘a pint of beer, two pounds of oranges’, and there is another group of measure words that are used for objects denoted by uncountable nouns, such as ‘two pieces of paper, a flock of sheep’. Unlike those in English and other languages, measure words in Chinese go with all kinds of nouns when the nouns are modified by numerals or demonstratives. Measure words in Chinese are also referred to as classifiers because they have an additional feature of expressing the conceptual classification of the referent of a noun along with some features that are salient to the speaker, such as size, shape and so on. For example, the classifier [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] tiao2 in Mandarin is used for objects that are long and narrow in shape, such as threads and dogs, and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] zhangl for objects that spread out with a flat surface, such as paper and tables. In contemporary Mandarin, there is a strong tendency to use a general classifier [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ge4 for all nouns, whether animate or inanimate.

Each Chinese dialect has its own classifier system. The choice of classifiers for individual nouns is particular to each dialect. Compared to Mandarin, Cantonese has a greater number of classifiers and there is no general classifier in this dialect.

Aspect markers

Like a number of other East Asian languages, Chinese is an aspect language and not a tense language (Norman, 1988). Tense is not grammaticalised in Chinese as there are no distinctions in verb form to indicate past, present or future tense. Temporal relations in Chinese are expressed by time words and contextual factors. On the contrary, the Chinese language has a rich system of aspect. Aspect is concerned with how a speaker presents a situation through different viewpoints, whether an action is completed or not, whether it is in progress or not, or whether a state has occurred or not. There are various grammatical means to express aspect in Chinese, including aspect markers (a group of bound morphemes most of which behave like verbal affixes), verb reduplication and verbal particles. Focusing on aspect markers, the perfective aspect for instance, which denotes some actions that have taken place, is expressed by the verbal suffix [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] le0 in Mandarin.

(1) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] wo3 mai3le0 hen3 duol shul I buy-ASP very many book ‘I bought a lot of books’

(2) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ming2tian1 xia4-le0 ke4 wo3men0 qu4 you2yong3 tomorrow down-ASP lesson we go swim ‘We’ll go to swim after class tomorrow’

As illustrated by (2), the perfective aspect does not relate to past tense as it may refer to events in the future. In fact, the occurrence of the perfective aspect marker [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] le0 in some past events may be ungrammatical.

(3) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] zhe4 shi4 wo3 zuo2tian1 mai3/*mai3le0 de0 shu1 this is I yesterday buy POSS book ‘This is the book I bought yesterday’

The aspect system and the usage of individual aspects in different dialects of Chinese may differ substantially from that of Mandarin. Cantonese, for instance, has a more complex aspectual system. It has a larger number of aspect-related morphemes that are unique to Cantonese. The approximate correspondence of the most commonly found aspects in Cantonese to those in Mandarin is shown in Table 1.4.

While most aspect markers in Mandarin carry the unstressed neutral tone, all aspect makers in Cantonese bear the full-fledged tone, similar to lexical items of other grammatical classes in the language.

Finally, it must be pointed out that it may not be necessary for aspect in both dialects to be marked by grammatical means, as aspect can also be expressed by lexical meanings or in context. For instance, the perfective marker is optional in (4) because the perfective aspect can be expressed by the verb with its resultative complement.

(4) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] wo3 shou1dao4/le0 yi1 fengl xin4 I receive-arrive one CL letter ‘I received a letter’

Chinese sentences

Sentence-hood or clause-hood in the Chinese language is not as straightforward as in other languages. In most Indo- European languages, a full sentence is characterised by the presence of a subject formed by a noun phrase and a predicate formed by a finite verb. However, neither the subject NP nor the predicate verb is obligatory in a Chinese sentence. The subject position in a Chinese sentence can be filled by an adjective as in (5a), a verb phrase (VP) as in (5b) or even left empty as in (6).

(5a) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] gan1jing4 shi4 hen3 zhong4yao4 de0 clean is very important SFP ‘To be clean is very important’

(5b) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] zuo4 yun4dong4 shi4 hen3 zhong4yao4 de0 do exercise is very important ‘Doing exercise is very important’

(6) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] xia4 yu3 le0 down rain SFP ‘It is raining’

Similarly, the predicate in a Chinese sentence may not involve any verbal element. The adjectival predicate in (7a) and the nominal predicate in (7b) are simply juxtaposed with their subjects without any linking verbs. Furthermore, an NP itself without any predicate can stand alone as a formal Chinese sentence as in (8).

(7a) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ta1 hen3 piao4liang4 she very pretty ‘She is very pretty’

(7b) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] jinltianl xinglqilsanl today Wednesday ‘Today is Wednesday’

(8) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] wo3 malmaO ne0 I mother SFP ‘Where is my mother?’

By now it should become apparent that minor sentences, i.e. irregular sentences not in the form of subject-predicate, are quite common in written Chinese. In fact, it has been claimed that minor sentences are more common than major sentences, i.e. full sentences in the form of subject-predicate, in Chinese (Chao, 1968; Cheung, 2007; Norman, 1988).

(Continues…)Excerpted from Language Disorders in Speakers of Chinese by Sam-Po Law, Brendan S. Weekes, Anita M-Y Wong. Copyright © 2009 Sam-Po Law, Brendan S. Weekes and Anita M-Y. Wong and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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