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Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\\textrm{H}1^{\\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.

Hmong and Cambodian Americans, minoritized Asian American subgroups, are underrepresented in research, and prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in these communities is unknown. However, our community partners in the Madison, Wisconsin area, who have served Hmong and Cambodian elders in the community for over 20 years, informed us in the fall of 2021 that they have encountered cases of dementia among elders they serve. They expressed a need for educational materials on dementia that could aid their community work. Following this meeting, we spent the year 2022‐2023 developing culturally and linguistically appropriate informational brochures on dementia. Brochures were developed with funding from the UW‐Madison Morgridge Center for Public Service. The project involved a diverse team of dementia researchers, community partners with expertise in providing wraparound services to the Hmong and Cambodian communities, a geriatrician, professional Hmong and Cambodian translators, and a professional graphic designer. The brochure development process was iterative. We started by researching existing educational materials on dementia for individuals with various health literacies. A draft of a 3‐panel brochure was drawn up by the first author in English and discussed with the team. Verbiage for each panel was carefully chosen based on feedback from our community partners. Specifically, the brochure would minimize verbosity and technical terms so elders could more easily grasp concepts. The graphic designer skillfully enhanced our preliminary brochure design. The translators worked in consultation with the first author to ensure the brochure’s overall concepts were accurately translated. The final product was a single brochure on dementia available in Hmong, Khmer (the Cambodian language), or English (Figure). Brochures were then disseminated to our community partners and during community events in the spring and fall of 2023. Our project demonstrates the feasibility of creating brochures that are culturally and linguistically tailored for the Hmong and Cambodian communities. We found the collaborative efforts of experts across various fields and vital insights from community partners familiar with target audiences to be imperative in our success. Similar initiatives should prioritize assembling diverse teams and engaging with community specialists at the beginning of the project to best reach underrepresented groups.

One of the central issues in cognition is identifying universal and culturally specific patterns of thought. In this study, we examined how one aspect of culture, a linguistic part of speech known asclassifiers, are related to categorization of solid objects. In Experiment 1, we used a numeral classifier elicitation task to examine the classifiers used by speakers of Hmong, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese (N = 34) with 135 nouns that referred to solid objects. In Experiment 2, adult speakers of English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Hmong (N = 64) rated the similarity of 39 pictured objects that depicted a subset of the nouns. All groups classified the objects into natural kinds and artifacts, with the category of humans anchoring both divisions. The main difference that emerged from the study was that speakers of Japanese and English rated humans and animals as more similar to each other than Hmong speakers; Mandarin speakers’ ratings of the similarity between humans and animals fell in between those of Hmong and English speakers. However, the pattern of categorization of humans and animals found among speakers of the classifier languages contradicted their patterns of classifier use. The findings help to tease apart the effects of language from other cultural factors that impact cognition.

This study investigates the acoustic and articulatory properties of phonation contrast in Shanghainese, the most thoroughly studied Chinese Wu dialect. Although previous studies generally suggest that the non-modal phonation associated with the lower register in Shanghainese is relatively breathier, it is unclear whether it is ‘breathy voice’, ‘slack voice’ or ‘whispery voice’. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese. Simultaneous audio and electroglottographic recordings were made from 52 speakers born before 1980. Both acoustic and articulatory data confirmed that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese is produced with relatively less glottal constriction and more aperiodic noise than the modal phonation. The novel finding of this study is that aperiodic noise plays a much more important role than spectral measures (i.e. indicators of glottal constriction) in the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation. This property is distinct from the breathier voices in Gujarati, White Hmong and Southern Yi. These results suggest that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese should be characterized as ‘whispery voice’, which is phonetically distinct from both ‘breathy voice’ and ‘slack voice’.

The Hmu language is spoken by approximately 1,250,000 people who reside in Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture (黔东南苗族侗族自治州), Guizhou Province (贵州省), the People's Republic of China (Wang & Mao 1995: 3–4; Lewis, Simons & Fenning 2016).

Two kinds of grain, “millet, 粟米 sùmǐ” and “husked rice, 稻 dào”, frequently appear in the Liye Qin Slips. Aside from these grains, another character seen in the Liye Qin Slips, nǎo, is thought to represent grain. It also represents the words for “brain, 腦 nǎo” in other excavated documents. Since the archaeological data show that rice cultivation was practised around the middle and lower Yangtze Valley, the homeland of Proto-Hmong Mien (formerly the state of Chu 楚地), the word for “rice plant, 稻 dào” seems to be a loanword from Proto-Hmong Mien *mbləu. The character nǎo is reconstructed as *nˤuʔ, which bears the same onset as the sound for “rice plant (or husked rice)” in North and East Hmongic languages nɯ (< *mbləu). Hence, we propose that the assimilation (*mbl- > *n-) in these languages could have occurred at the latest just before or after the Qin dynasty.

Previous studies on relativization strategies often treat semantic and syntactic gaps in isolation, neglecting their inherent connections. This paper employs a corpus-driven approach from a typological perspective, utilizing cross-linguistic questionnaires for native speakers and large-scale corpus investigations to analyze the characteristics of semantic and syntactic gaps in English and Chinese relative clauses. The findings reveal that while both languages share a double-headed structure, semantic gaps belong to deep structure and syntactic gaps to surface structure. Due to typological differences, Chinese—with its flexible word order and morphological constraints—tends to employ semantic gaps. In contrast, English, constrained by animacy, mood, and other factors, resorts to semantic gaps only in specific contexts, predominantly relying on syntactic gaps. This study not only clarifies differences in relativization between English and Chinese but also provides cross-linguistic and corpus-based support for the theoretical hypothesis of “semantic gap primacy” in English and Chinese, contributing to advancements in linguistic typology. Plain Language Summary How English and Chinese Construct Semantic Gaps: A Study of Relative Clauses This study investigates how English and Chinese construct sentences where some words are implied rather than stated, a phenomenon called \"gaps.\" While both languages use these gaps, they do so in very different ways due to their distinct rules. Chinese often relies on word order to imply gaps, making noun phrases like \"[wo chi de] shitang\" (meaning \"the canteen where I eat\") feel natural. This approach, called “semantic gaps”, works because Chinese has flexible word order and does not need extra morphological markers to clarify meaning. English, on the other hand, prefers to fill these gaps with visible words like \"that\" or \"who,\" as in \"the book [that I read].\" These \"syntactic gaps\" are more rigid and depend on factors like whether the head noun is a person or thing or accessibility hierarchy. For example, English rarely uses constructions like \"that why\" except in specific cases, such as explaining the actions. The study compared six languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Hmong, Malay, and Indonesian) and analyzed thousands of sentences from English corpora (COCA). Key findings include: (1) Chinese and neighboring languages allow more flexibility in semantic gap usage, while English restricts semantic gaps to certain contexts. (2) In English, semantic gaps like \"that which\" appear more often in formal writing, whereas spoken English avoids it. (3) Language learners (e.g., Chinese students learning English) often struggle with these patterns, defaulting to simpler structures. This research helps explain why direct translations between languages often fail and offers insights for language teaching and AI tools like translators. Future work could explore how people process these semantic gaps in real time or how they evolve historically.

Biomedical communication is an area that increasingly benefits from natural language processing (NLP) work. Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) in particular provides a foundation for advanced NLP applications, such as automated medical question-answering and translation services. However, while a large body of biomedical documents are available in an array of languages, most work in biomedical NER remains in English, with the remainder in official national or regional languages. Minority languages so far remain an underexplored area. The Hmong language, a minority language with sizable populations in several countries and without official status anywhere, represents an exceptional challenge for effective communication in medical contexts. Taking advantage of the large number of government-produced medical information documents in Hmong, we have developed the first named entity-annotated biomedical corpus for a resource-poor minority language. The Hmong Medical Corpus contains 100,535 tokens with 4554 named entities (NEs) of three UMLS semantic types: diseases/syndromes, signs/symptoms, and body parts/organs/organ components. Furthermore, a subset of the corpus is annotated for word position and parts of speech, representing the first such gold-standard dataset publicly available for Hmong. The methodology presented provides a readily reproducible approach for the creation of biomedical NE-annotated corpora for other resource-poor languages.

Cross-linguistic studies on tone and phonation have revealed the role of laryngeal phonatory settings in tonal contrasts. However, systematic research on how individuals within the same speech community achieve multidimensional tonal distinction remains lacking. Hmu, an Eastern Hmongic language, is typologically notable for its five level tones, offering ideal material for examining the interaction between pitch and phonation. Based on acoustic and EGG data collected from 30 speakers, this study investigates the differentiation strategies of the five level tones at both the group and individual levels. The results reveal that T11 differs significantly from the other four level tones across acoustic and EGG parameters, characterized by a larger spectral tilt and a higher noise level, aligning with the properties of breathy voice. In contrast, the other four level tones generally exhibit a smaller spectral tilt and lower noise, consistent with the characteristics of modal voice. Among them, T55, due to its high F0, may be further identified as a high-pitched voice. Individually, native speakers show variation in how they utilize phonations to encode linguistic contrast in T11, with three primary subtypes observed: breathy, harsh, and near-modal voice. Significantly, the non-modal phonation associated with T11 does not extend across the entire vowel but is primarily concentrated in the first third. We also found that an individual’s pitch range may be one factor influencing the number of acoustic cues they use when distinguishing tones. Speakers with a narrower pitch range usually employ non-modal phonations. This study provides empirical evidence that tonal contrast is multidimensional and offers a referential analysis method for future investigations into individual variation in phonation type.

This paper discusses spatio-temporal metaphors in three regions in and around China from the perspective of language contact, looking for evidence of areal convergence or transfer of the conceptual metaphors. The approach fits broadly within the framework of Cognitive Contact Linguistics. After a review of spatio-temporal metaphors in the Sinitic languages, I sketch out the relevant metaphors in languages spoken in northwest China (Xinjiang and the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund), in and near northeast China, and in south China and Taiwan – many of which have not been discussed previously in the literature on conceptual metaphor. The study reveals evidence for metaphor transfer involving the up-down spatial dimension from Sinitic to Japanese and Korean, contact-facilitated extension of metaphor involving the front-back dimension in Tsou, and possible transfer of front-back metaphor to other languages of Taiwan. Several of the lexical items used in front-back metaphorical expressions in Santa, two Hmong varieties, Japanese, and Korean are borrowed from Sinitic, but these do not clearly represent transfer of the conceptual mapping.