School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemThe effect of including non-native accents in English listening tests for young learners: psychometric and learner perspectives( 2015)As English has been used widely as a lingua franca for communication, language testers have started to evaluate the proposal for introducing non-native accents into the listening input of English tests. This study aims to further this debate from both the psychometric and learner perspectives by not only investigating how accents influence test takers’ performance, but also eliciting their subjective perception of accents. 80 young L1-Mandarin test takers were recruited and divided into four groups, with each group listening to one accented version of the same test. The four accents used in this study were Australian, Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin English accents. Test takers subsequently completed a Likert-scale questionnaire, which measured their accent perception on three sub-scales, Familiarity, Comprehension and Attitude. Results indicate that the Mandarin accent group performed significantly better than the other three groups in the test and also perceived the Mandarin accent significantly more comprehensible, lending support for the shared-L1 effect. No significant difference is observed among the three non-Mandarin groups whether in the test scores or the Comprehension sub-scale. There is no significant difference in test takers’ perception of the four accents in terms of Familiarity or Attitude. The central implication from this study is that there is potential for the inclusion of non-native accents into listening tests provided the shared-L1 effect can be properly addressed.
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ItemCan machine translation be used for literary texts? Evidence from a reception study( 2022)Despite the growing use of machine translation (MT) systems to translate texts in various domains, there remain considerable doubts about using this technology for the translation of literary texts. However, the outlook for using MT for literary translation has been enhanced by the advent of neural machine translation (NMT), a newly proposed paradigm for machine translation that outperforms the previously dominant paradigms such as phrase-based machine translation. To examine whether neural machine translation can be used to render (or help human translators to render) literary texts, this study compares how literary readers receive free-verse poems and excerpts from novels that have been translated from English into Chinese in three modalities: the raw machine translations (MTs) produced by a freely available generic NMT system, the post-edited machine translations (MTPEs) produced by a novice translator with no professional experience in literary translation, and the published fully human translations (HTs) produced by professional human translators. In total, fifteen translations (five start texts x three modalities) were investigated on the basis of actual reception by 131 readers. Given the complexity of literary reception, three research methods are used to triangulate the readers’ receptions of the literary translations: a translation-rating task in which the readers rated their reading experience of the given translations, a translation-annotation task in which the readers annotated the text items in the translations with likes and dislikes, and semi-structured interviews in which the readers compared and commented on the different translations of each start text. A total of 131 subjects performed the first two tasks, with each subject responding to one of the three translations of each start text. Subsequently, 15 volunteers from the sample participated in the post-hoc interviews. In this study, “annotation heatmaps” were proposed as an innovative method to visualise and analyse the readers’ liked and disliked annotations. Drawing on the heatmaps frequently used in eye-tracking studies, the annotation heatmaps visualise the frequency of each translation segment being liked or disliked by the readers with different shades of the highlighting colours of the translation segments. By showing the patterns in which the renditions in a translation were appreciated by the subjects and comparing the appreciation patterns of the corresponding renditions in different translation versions, the heatmaps provide fine-grained understanding of how the translation solutions in a target text affect the readers’ literary reception and how the human- and machine-produced solutions differ from each other in their effects on the reception side. Since the annotation maps present empirical data on the frequency of each translation segment be approved or rejected by its readers, rich discussions are elicited on the communicative risks associated with literary translation. Methodologically, the annotation heatmaps well complemented the rating and interview data. Altogether, the three types of reception data provide consistent and mutually enriching insights into the readers’ reception processes. First, although the raw MTs generally received a less positive reception than the other translation modalities, each raw MT involved a considerable number of textual elements that were appreciated positively by most readers. This finding to a large extent challenges the widespread conviction that machine-translated literary texts are not worth reading. Second, although produced by a novice post-editor in a short amount of time, most of the MTPEs not only resulted in a better reading experience than did the raw machine translations but also received similar or even more positive appreciation than did the fully human translations. Given that the MTPEs were produced by a novice in a short amount of time whereas the HTs were taken from published translations rendered by professional literary translators, the small gap between MTPEs and HTs supports the feasibly of using machine translation and post-editing for literary translation. Third, for each start text, there are cases in which the renditions in the published HTs worked less well than did the solutions in the MTs or MTPEs. Thus, human translations cannot be assumed to be a flawless gold standard for the translation of literary text.
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ItemKinship terms and fan identities in Chinese cyberspace( 2021)With more time being spent online, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, online communication is increasingly becoming the norm. As a consequence, the Internet has become a timely and important medium in which to explore the use of language and the construction of identity, particularly in the understudied context of Chinese-speaking cyberspace. While the semantics and pragmatics of Chinese kinship terms have been discussed by scholars, they have not previously been analysed from a sociolinguistic perspective in the context of online communication, where they are used extensively. This thesis addresses this gap. This thesis aims to explore how kinship terms are used in identity negotiation in online communication and their subsequent relationship with gender discourses. Three main research questions are posed: How are kinship terms used as part of the construction of different identities in Chinese-speaking cyberspace? How is fan identity represented and constructed in Chinese-speaking cyberspace? How does communication in Chinese-speaking cyberspace reflect broader discourses of gender and sexuality in China? The thesis focuses on the use of a specific kinship term in cyberspace, ‘wife’ (老婆), which has not been discussed in past studies. The thesis investigates how ‘wife’ is used in the discourse of fans to address the main character in a popular Chinese martial arts TV series, ‘Word of Honor’（山河令）. The thesis draws on third wave sociolinguistic theory and multimodal discourse analysis to undertake this analysis and qualitative data was collected through online ethnography. By analysing fan-created videos and comments about these videos, the thesis argues that the kinship term ‘wife’ is characteristic of a particular ‘fan style’. By examining the diverse social meanings of this kinship terms in different contexts, the thesis further argues that kinship terms gain contextualized meanings through repeated stylistic practices. A potential indexical field of ‘wife’ is generated, and identity categories, such as fans and Ni Su fans emerge and are reinforced through these repeated stylistic practices. The thesis also explores the relationship between fan identity and gender discourses, arguing that the ‘big D’ gender discourses reflected in the ‘small d’ discourse of fan communication reflect heteronormativity and an inherent gender binary, while at the same time, dynamic understandings of gender is increasingly accepted, so that ‘wife’ is increasingly used by female fans to address other female fans to signal solidarity, closeness, humour and a somewhat subversive view of sexuality, which might otherwise be considered taboo in other Chinese-speaking contexts.
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ItemLinguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in Australia( 2020)Deeper and wider processes of globalisation have contributed to increased mobility in society. As more people move across borders along with their personal histories, cultures and languages, transnational places and diaspora communities have become ideal sites of research (Arnaut, Blommaert, Rampton, & Spotti, 2016; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015). Recently, there has been unprecedented interest in sociolinguistic phenomena in superdiverse, metropolitan cities, giving rise to the emergence of linguistic landscape research. Linguistic landscape originally referred to the languages used on publicly visible street signs, such as shop signs, advertisements and road signs (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht, 2006). Later, the definition was expanded to account for the use of all semiotic resources, including linguistic forms, in the public arena (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010). Despite ongoing efforts to document and describe urban landscapes in different parts of the world (Blackwood, Lanza, & Woldemariam, 2016), little work to date has attempted to formulate a comprehensive response to recent trends in linguistic landscape research. As a fledgling field of study, linguistic landscape research has received wide criticism for employing a crude type of quantitative analysis that regards languages as clearly definable units (Blommaert, 2019). The fact that the linguistic landscape perspective can incorporate different fields of sociolinguistics, such as research on minority languages, also raises questions about its theoretical and methodological paths (Van Mensel, Vandenbrouke, & Blackwood, 2017). Drawing on frameworks grounded in geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), superdiversity (Blommaert, 2013) and metrolingualism (Pennycook, 2017), this thesis aims to interrogate the theory, methodology, framing of power and relevance of linguistic landscape research. For this purpose, I employ an ethnographically oriented approach to examine three complex case studies of the linguistic landscapes of Chinese communities in Victoria, Australia. Throughout the thesis, I gradually construct the coherent argument that linguistic landscape research benefits from a geosemiotic theory, an ethnographic methodology, a social semiotic perspective to power relations and an exploration of social media landscape. Findings of the three case studies shed light on how semiotic resources are purposefully employed to construct nostalgia, power and identity. Overall, the thesis expands the theoretical and methodological reach of linguistic landscape research by interrogating the urban-centric perspective, adopting an assemblage view of sign systems, offering a triadic framework for power relations, and pushing the boundaries of linguistic landscapes.
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ItemDiscourses in action: Operations of race, sexuality and gender in Chinese talk-in-interaction( 2020)This thesis is a conversation analytic and poststructuralist study of discourses and social categories. In particular, it analyses how discursive categories of race, sexuality and gender operate in talk among a group of Chinese lesbians, and how the categories produced by these discourses are implemented in, and potentially reshaped by, interaction. The data which is presented and analysed in this thesis comes from a corpus of approximately 16 hours of audio recordings of conversations between and with Chinese lesbians who live in Melbourne, Australia. The thesis has two main aims. Firstly, it analyses how discourses operate in interaction. It does this by locating moments in interaction where discourses of race, sexuality and gender are oriented to. It shows how categories of race are resisted in ambiguous interactional projects; categories of sexuality are shown to operate and potentially alter in repair sequences; and categories of gender are shown to operate and be normalised in storytelling sequences. Secondly, the thesis aims to develop a critical conversation analysis methodology. In order to achieve this aim, the thesis builds on feminist and critically-oriented conversation analysis (CA) to develop and implement critical CA. This methodology finds points of compatibility between CA and poststructuralism. The implementation of this methodology also contributes to the long-standing debate between conversation analysts and critically-oriented discourse analysts about the compatibility between poststructuralist and conversation analytic epistemologies. The thesis concludes that critical CA can indeed be used to show the operation of discourses in mundane, everyday interaction. This can improve our understanding of how social categories are produced, sustained, resisted, and even potentially altered. Such findings may allow us to contribute an understanding of the operation of discourse to a political project of reducing discrimination based on social categories.
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ItemPhonological activation in Hong Kong deaf readers: Evidence from eye movements and event-related potentials( 2020)Understanding the roles of spoken and sign phonological code in reading processes is important for educators of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. However, the pool of data on this topic is limited and has mostly centered on readers of alphabetic languages. In places like Hong Kong, where deaf signers are relatively few, the shortage of research on phonological processing during reading is even more severe. This thesis addressed this problem by investigating the cognitive processes underlying Chinese reading in Hong Kong deaf readers using two methodological approaches, eye movements and event-related potentials, across four separate studies. Studies 1 and 2 used the error disruption paradigm with eye-tracking to investigate the patterns of orthographic and phonological activation in hearing and deaf readers. The hearing reader data suggested that they rely mostly on orthography to access word meanings in early processing. However, early phonological activation was found to be facilitated top-down by semantics when targets were predictable. The deaf readers were also found to rely primarily on orthographic information to access word meanings, but phonological code played a role in late processing and was modulated by contextual predictability and reading level. Study 3 used a parafoveal preview paradigm with eye-tracking to investigate how sign phonologically related previews affect reading processes in Hong Kong deaf readers. The pattern of results suggested that these readers activate sign phonological representations when reading Chinese words and that different sign phonological parameters (i.e., handshape, location, and movement) have different effects on parafoveal processing. Study 4 investigated orthographic, spoken phonological, and sign phonological processing in Hong Kong deaf readers using two error disruption paradigms with ERPs, focusing on the P200 and N400 components. The results for Experiment 1 revealed that N400 amplitudes were reduced in the orthographic condition, which suggested that orthographic representations were facilitating lexical access. In the homophonic condition, N400 amplitudes were increased in the right central eleci trodes. In Experiment 2, P200 amplitudes were significantly reduced in the left anterior electrodes in the sign phonological condition. In sum, the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 suggest that the early P200 component is modulated by sign phonology, and the later N400 component is modulated by orthography and spoken phonology in Hong Kong deaf readers. In sum, these studies suggest that while deaf readers tend to activate word meanings directly through orthography, they can also activate spoken phonological and sign phonological codes. Consistently across the eye movement and ERP studies, the effects of sign phonological activation emerged in early stages of processing, and the effects of spoken phonology emerged in later stages of processing. The different time courses of spoken and sign phonological activation may be an indication that deaf readers tend to use sign representations to activate word meanings and spoken phonological representations for later integrative processes. In conclusion, these findings can be taken to suggest that both types of phonological code are important for deaf readers.
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ItemBehind the presence of Chinese: the linguistic landscape of Box Hill( 2016)With the ongoing trend of globalisation, more attention has been paid to multilingual and multicultural communication in the urban area. Such growing interests have made linguistic landscape (LL) studies, which address languages on public signage, a popular approach to sociolinguistics and social semiotics in the past few years. Previous LL literature has been preoccupied with the spread of English in multilingual cities around the world with little attention to the role of Chinese in the Australian urban context. As such, the current study aims to conduct a LL study concerning the use of Chinese in Box Hill. To achieve this aim, I used photographs of signs, such as street signs, shop names and promotional signs, as the source of data. A multi-layered approach combining quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to firstly give an overview of the language combinations in Box Hill and secondly dive deeper into the intentions and ideologies underlying linguistic and semiotic choices. Findings of this study show that different signs have their respective language choices and semiotic preferences, and these can be understood in relation to the social context and cultural knowledge. This study revealed the status of Chinese language in an English-dominant environment. It contributed to the field of LL by promoting a multimodal perspective of photographic data, and made an effort to extend multimodal theories to accounting for signs with a Chinese origin. The study has important implications for linguistic and visual literacy. It suggests that language learning should not be based solely on linguistic knowledge, but also include cultural understandings. In addition, visual literacy is as important as linguistic literacy and are key in deciphering the meaning of signs in the modern world.
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ItemA contrastive analysis of Chinese and English writing of Singaporean students( 2008)This thesis compared the essays of 13 Singaporean students, written in English and Chinese, within the theoretical framework of contrastive rhetoric. The study responded to criticisms made of contrastive rhetoric, by including new methodologies, particularly the experiences of participants as a significant part of the qualitative analysis. The analysis of essay data focused on how arguments were framed and their content. The questionnaire and interview data investigated student's experiences and attitudes towards learning and using the two languages.. It was found that (a) there were similarities in terms of overall structure of the essays and transfer of certain Chinese stylistic devices, (b) there were differences in the use of other Chinese stylistic devices, and the arguments in Chinese essays clustered around personal-informal-emotional arguments whereas those in the English essays clustered around impersonal-formal-rational arguments. These themes were reflected in the questionnaire and interview data as well.