provides an overview of the Chinese language and its many dialects and how they differ from other Asiatic languages (e.g., Japanese). The chapter then reviews the origins and evolution of the Chinese writing system. The chapter closes with an overview of the modern Chinese writing system and its conventions, including points of difference with other writing systems (e.g., alphabetic scripts like English) and examples of how words can be decomposed into characters, radicals, and strokes.

It is often necessary to use more than one skull base approach for the treatment of complex lesions to maximize resection and minimize morbidity and mortality. The advent of widespread endoscope use has increased the armamentarium for skull base surgeons to tackle these dangerous tumors and lesions. A combined endoscopic transnasal and simultaneous transorbital approach allows for minimally invasive multiportal surgery to reach difficult-to-access skull base regions with minimal collateral damage. Multiple surgical trajectories can be readily and safely obtained in a minimally invasive manner. The use of standard zero-degree endoscopes via this approach allows for easier and safer manipulation of the target lesion. In this way, multistage or more invasive surgery can often be avoided, minimizing complications, and lesions can be removed en-bloc.

Previous studies have shown that directing learners’ attention during perceptual training facilitates detection and learning of unfamiliar consonant categories (Guion & Pederson, 2007; Pederson & Guion, 2010). The current study asks whether this attentional directing can also facilitate other types of phonetic learning. Monolingual Mandarin speakers were divided into two groups directed to learn either 1) the consonants or 2) the tones in an identification training task with the same set of Southern Min monosyllabic words containing the consonants /pʰ, p, b, kh, k, ɡ, tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ and the tones (55, 33, 22, 24, 41). All subjects were also tested with an AXB discrimination task (with a distinct set of Southern Min words) before and after the training. Unsurprisingly, both groups improved accuracy in the sound type to which they attended. However, the consonant-attending group did not improve in discriminating tones after training and neither did the tone-attending group in discriminating consonants -- despite both groups having equal exposure to the same training stimuli. When combined with previous results for consonant and vowel training, these results suggest that explicitly directing learners’ attention has a broadly facilitative effect on phonetic learning including of tonal contrasts.

The goal of this study was to examine the role of cognitive abilities in implicit learning of two types of contrasts — lexical tone contrasts and coronal consonant contrasts. Twenty-four adult native English speakers naïve to Vietnamese were asked to learn the names of twelve funny monsters, that is monosyllabic words differing in tones and initial consonants. After a word-identification training with feedback, learning was assessed using a 12-word alternative test and an auditory discrimination test. In addition, participants completed six tests of cognitive abilities involving episodic memory, working memory, executive function and attention, processing speed, and vocabulary (NIH & Northwestern University, 2006-2012). For both identification and discrimination, the proportion of tone errors was significantly larger than the proportion of consonant errors, but cognitive measures did not predict the occurrence of tone versus consonant errors. Processing speed and executive function and attention scores were significantly correlated with response accuracies in both tests. These results suggest that for beginning learners, individual differences in some cognitive abilities related to the fluid cognition complex correlate with implicit learning of phonetic categories of different types. However, working memory, arguably the most studied factor, appears not to matter in this learning scenario.

This chapter considers the relation between production and perception of L2 tone in speakers of Kiên Giang Khmer who are fluent to varying degrees in Southern Vietnamese. In addition to directly comparing L2 to L1 performance in tonal production and perception, we explore how perception might be related to the internal organization of a speaker’s own production system by comparing distances between f0 curves to accuracy in a speeded AX discrimination task. Relative to native speakers, we found considerable individual variation among speakers of Kiên Giang Khmer with L2 knowledge of Vietnamese in the degree to which they approximated Vietnamese tonal targets. Production accuracy was most strongly related to age, while discrimination performance correlated best with education. In addition, we observed a weak correlation between the acoustic distance of a Khmer speaker’s production of tone T to the native Vietnamese production of T, and the ability to discriminate tone T from other tones. However, speakers who acoustically separated two tones in their own productions were also more accurate at discriminating those tones in perception, regardless of how well those productions approximated native speaker targets.

This study investigated the production of the four Mandarin tones by a group of school-aged Spanish learners of Chinese (n=12) and a group of native Chinese children (n=4) with a mean age of 9.5 years. The participants were recorded in a quiet room at the school premises while performing an imitation task in which they produced 32 monosyllabic words embedded in a carrier phrase. Time-normalized pitch contours were extracted at 20 consecutive points, converted to logarithmic Z-scores to normalize F0 variation across talkers and submitted to growth curve analysis to compare the surface F0 contours of the four tones. A significant difference in the F0 shapes produced by the two groups was found for all four tones, but a significant difference in F0 height was found only for Tones 2 and 3. The findings suggested that native-like production of pitch contour may be more challenging than pitch height due to their relatively more complex f0-related laryngeal muscle activities and lesser attention to the former than the latter F0 dimension among non-native tone listeners.