Endangered and Extinct Formosan Languages Principal Investigator: Paul Li

1
Endangered and Extinct Formosan
Languages(Principal Investigator Paul Li)

• Fig1Distrubtion of Formosan languages

• This project is salvage linguistics, working
  on a few Formosan languages on the verge of
  extinction and a few extinct Formosan languages
  for which written documents are available. We
  investigated the languages that still have a few
  older speakers left Pazih, Thao, Kanakanavu,
  Saaroa and Kavalan, and worked on the written
  documents (including field notes by Japanese
  scholars) of Siraya, Favorlang and Basay. It is
  essential for maintaining the great diversity of
  Formosan languages.

2
Theoretical basis and procedures for the
construction of a geographic information system
for languages in Taiwan(Principle investigator
Chin-Chuan Cheng)

• The purpose of the project was to combine
  linguistic field work and geographic information
  technology in order to establish a geographic
  information system for language distribution in
  Taiwan. Besides the completed survey of language
  identification of all the households in Xinfeng
  Township, Xinzhu County and Lunbei Township,
  Yunlin County, the project utilized advanced
  technology of satellite and aerial maps and
  successfully formed a model of language
  distribution in microscopic view. The model will
  facilitate the construction of a language
  geographic information system for all the
  languages in Taiwan. It will also provide the
  resources for further linguistic research,
  language policy decisions, and land management.

Fig2 Photo of Fengkeng and Shangkeng Bordering
Area in Xinfeng Township
3
Cognitive and neural mechanisms for Chinese
language processes (Principle investigator
Ovid J.L. Tzeng and Chia-Ying Lee)

• 
  
  This project aims to understand the cognitive and
  neural basis of Chinese word recognition by using
  an interdisciplinary approach, including
  behavioral, neuroimaging (fMRI) and
  electrophysiology (ERP/MEG) measurements. The
  current findings suggest that the phonological
  information provided by the sublexical unit
  (phonetic radical) plays a role in reading
  Chinese phonograms. Furthermore, the
  event-related fMRI study has identified a set of
  neural correlates, including the left inferior
  frontal gyrus, the left temporoparietal (inferior
  parietal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus) region,
  and the left temporal-occipital junction,
  involved in Chinese orthography-to-phonology
  transformation. These are congruent with the
  findings of researches using alphabetic scripts
  and imply that the underlying cognitive and
  neural mechanisms for orthography-to-phonology
  transformation are language universal.

4
Construction of Language Ontology (Principle
investigatorChu-Ren Huang)

• This project is aimed to construct an
  online Chinese Lexical Knowledgebase, especially
  focusing on the explanation and discrimination
  for senses of a "word." The research result
  includes building a model of the Chinese Lexical
  Knowledge and developing the following relevant
  research issuesConstructing Hantology and the
  interface,Extracting the discrimination and
  relationship between word senses from the
  structure of Hanzi writing system,Using the
  semantic structure in ontology to explain the
  metaphor in languages,Extracting the sentences
  from the POS-tagged digital text and setting the
  varied grammar functions automatically.

Fig4conceptual ontology,characterized ontology
and lexicalized ontology
5

Higher Level Organization and Discourse Prosody
A hierarchical framework of Prosodic Phrase
Grouping (PG)(Principle investigator
Chiu-yu,Tseng)

• We present arguments with quantitative
  evidences to demonstrate that fluent speech
  prosody contains higher-level discourse
  information apart from segmental, tonal and
  intonation information. Discourse information is
  reflected through relative cross-phrase prosodic
  associations, and should be included and
  accounted for in prosody analysis. A Hierarchical
  Prosodic Phrase Grouping (HPG) framework is used
  to explain how in order to convey higher-level
  association individual phrases are adjusted to
  form coherent multiple-phrase speech paragraphs.
  Implications are significant to both phonetic
  investigations as well as technology development.