This chapter presents a corpus-based study of the segmental and tonal accents in the iGeneration’s Taiwanese Southern Min (iTSM). Segmentally, iTSM speakers exhibit several distinctive phonological processes. Stop codas in checked syllables are elided, followed by resyllabification rather than gemination. Labial nasal codas are coronalized, while coronal nasal codas are velarized. Velarized nasal codas undergo gemination, while coronalized codas resist it. Labial nasal codas resyllabify to the following onsets. Voiced velar stop onsets, the most marked in the voiced stop series, are often elided or nasalized before nasal vowels, while less marked voiced labial stops and laterals are preserved. Nasalization in iTSM, both intra- and inter-syllabic, shows non-crisp edge phenomena, contrasting with TSM’s crisp edge phenomenon.

Tonally, stop coda elision results in the loss of checked tones, shifting to smooth tones with compensatory vowel lengthening. The study also shows that iTSM speakers prefer parsing longer expressions into tetrasyllabic or shorter fragments, which function as phonological phrases and constrain the application of tone sandhi. This phrasing process is sensitive to syntactic adjuncthood and syllable count.

Chapter 2 introduces the “nuts and bolts” of the brain. It describes how neurons represent and transmit information, and how the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain most relevant to word meaning. Special emphasis is placed on the following large-scale cortical systems: modal networks of sensory and motor areas; transmodal networks of association areas; and the core language network. This chapter also briefly outlines the brain mapping methods that are used in the various experiments discussed in Chapters 3–7.

This study aligns with Hsiao’s (1991, 1995b) prosodic parameters. In common speech, the tone group (TG) is a phonological phrase marked at the right edge of a non-adjunct XP. Following the Prosodic Hierarchy, an intonational phrase is a sense unit ending with a boundary tone and a pause, typically realized as a complete sentence but subject to restructuring with parentheticals, tag questions, or lists.

To explain tone sandhi, Chinese phonology employs a “prosodic foot” distinct from standard hierarchies. This study proposes two Metrical Hierarchies: Tonal and Rhythmic. The “prosodic foot” is redefined as the metrical tone phrase within the Tonal Metrical Hierarchy. While it governs tone sandhi in metrical reading, it does not dictate verse rhythm. Instead, the phrase is constructed from metrical beats, as a syllable-based approach fails to explain rhythmic tone patterns. A revised Beat Addition assigns initial beats to lexical syllables, while function words, suffixes, and internal syntactic ICs receive or share beats.

Syntactic c-command is dispensable, as it may yield illicit tone patterns and overlook tonal variation. Adjuncthood, rather than c-command, often determines the absence of tone sandhi.

Chapter 4 turns to the so-called general semantic network (GSN), which consists of several very high-level, interconnected cortical areas that are considered transmodal because they operate on two or more types of sensory/motor information. Mounting evidence suggests that the GSN contributes to word meanings by performing a variety of integrative and relational functions. Continuing with the example of scissors, the GSN conjoins its distinctive experiential features (which, as noted above, are housed in modal networks of sensory/motor areas), assembles them into a coherent concept that can easily be accessed during language production and comprehension, situates this particular concept in relation to many others, and connects it with personal memories and attitudes (e.g., using one’s favorite pair of scissors in an enjoyable project). As we’ll see, one of the most fascinating properties of the GSN is that it overlaps substantially with the well-studied default mode network (DMN), which mediates internally oriented mental processes such as recalling one’s past, imagining one’s future, simulating dialogues, and contemplating other people’s thoughts and feelings – all of which require semantic cognition.

Chapter 5 addresses yet another aspect of word meanings. Back in the mid-twentieth century, the linguist J. R. Firth (1957, p. 11) stated that “you shall know a word by the company it keeps.” More recently, this idea has been supported by distributional semantic models (DSMs), which come from computational linguistics and demonstrate that a word’s meaning can in fact be derived partly from its statistical co-occurrence patterns with other words. For instance, part of the meaning of scissors can be derived from its tendency to be used together with certain other words like sharp, pointy, cut, snip, paper, hair, etc. DSMs are surprisingly good at predicting people’s performance on many (although not all) conceptual tasks, and they are now so sophisticated that they constitute the engines of many chatbots and AI systems. What’s more, by combining DSMs with brain mapping methods, a rapidly growing line of research has been accumulating evidence that the distributionally based properties of word meanings are not only captured by purely verbal representations in the core language network, but enable a “quick and dirty” shortcut to comprehension.

This chapter explores the rhythmic structures present in two linguistic forms within Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM): traditional verse and everyday speech. It analyzes oracle poems, puppet theater entrance verses, and idiomatic expressions through a proposed metrical hierarchy that demonstrates significant flexibility. This framework can be partially adapted, fully implemented, or combined in various ways to produce diverse rhythmic patterns in verse.

Everyday speech demonstrates robust correspondence between prosodic architecture and syntactic organization. This rhythmic variation arises primarily through two interdependent mechanisms: prosodic phrasing constraints governing hierarchical groupings, and metrical beat-sharing patterns regulating temporal coordination. Crucially, prosodic phrasing – particularly intonational phrasing – incorporates silent beat insertion to maintain rhythmic integrity. Function words systematically undergo prosodic subordination, sharing metrical beats with adjacent syllables, while tetrasyllabic configurations enforce beat-sharing behavior

Chapter 1 sets the stage by describing several linguistic and psychological aspects of word meaning, with emphasis on those that have received the most attention in cognitive neuroscience. Specific topics include the treatment of word meanings as public concepts for social coordination; the decomposition of word meanings into semantic features; the characterization of word meanings in terms of frames, prototypes, mental models, and background situations; the nature of word associations and co-occurrence patterns; the influence of context on interpretation; and the importance of crosslinguistic similarities and differences.

This chapter examines the vowel system of the Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) language, which is notable for its extensive array of nasal vowels. Each oral vowel in TSM typically has a corresponding nasal vowel, and these pairs are considered distinct phonemes.

The vowel inventory of TSM includes unmarked rounded back vowels and unrounded front vowels; however, it lacks a central vowel. The back vowels [o] and [ɤ] display regional variation: [o] is a northern accent, while [ɤ] is southern.

A glide is introduced before a vowel to generate a rising diphthong. This process occurs irrespective of the vowel’s height. Analogous to the behavior of vowels, these rising diphthongs can also be succeeded by a consonant coda within the language’s syllabic structure. Conversely, falling diphthongs cannot be succeeded by a consonant coda.

Vowel length in TSM is predictable: vowels in open syllables are long, those in closed syllables ending with a nasal consonant are short, and vowels in checked syllables are extra short. Additionally, TSM features two syllabic nasal consonants, [ŋ̩] and [m̩]. These have evolved both synchronically and diachronically from the consonantalization of nasal vowels and the vocalization of consonant onsets.

Chapter 7 concentrates on abstract words like democracy, luxury, and chance. These words are harder to characterize and investigate than concrete ones like bird, mug, and banana, but the pace of progress in understanding their cognitive and neural bases has dramatically increased in recent years. For instance, it’s now clear that compared to concrete words, abstract ones rely more on verbal associations, occur in a broader range of contexts, and are rated higher for certain types of semantic features (e.g., time, social interaction, emotion, and drive). Consistent with these differences, it’s well-established that abstract words rely more than concrete ones on a few very high-level cortical areas that play vital roles in language processing while also contributing to the GSN/DMN. And yet there’s also mounting evidence that, like concrete words, many abstract ones are anchored to some extent in systems for perception and action. In addition, an increasing amount of research has been exploring how different categories of abstract words (e.g., those for numbers, emotions, mental states, and moral judgments) are associated with different sets of partly shared and partly segregated brain regions.

Chapter 3 begins to elaborate a central theme of the book, which is that word meanings are not localized in just one part of the brain; instead, they have a widely distributed web-like layout that includes many different cortical areas and corresponding types of representation. This particular chapter focuses on the experiential (e.g., visual, auditory, and motor) features of word meanings. The key idea is that, in keeping with theories of grounded/embodied cognition, these concrete features are identical to some of the modality-specific representations that allow us to make sense of our nonlinguistic experiences involving the pertinent types of entities and events. For example, the word “scissors” denotes a kind of household tool with specifications for shape, motion, sound, and manipulation, and considerable research suggests that we store these features directly within some of the same cortical areas that are engaged when we see, hear, and use scissors. Such findings are exciting because they support the intuitive view that words are like instructions for neurally simulating experiences, albeit usually in an automatic, implicit manner. There’s still a great deal of debate, however, about the precise ways in which word meanings relate to perception and action.