Investigating the Lexical Representation of Mandarin Tone 3 Phonological Alternations
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Investigating the Lexical Representation of Mandarin Tone 3 Phonological Alternations Yu‑Fu Chien1,2 · Hanbo Yan3 · Joan A. Sereno4 Accepted: 12 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Phonological alternations pose challenges for models of spoken word recognition in how surface information is mapped onto stored representations in the lexicon. In the current study, an auditory-auditory priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to investigate the alternating representations of Mandarin Tone 3 in both half-third and third tone sandhi contexts. In Mandarin, a full Tone 3 (213) is reduced to an abridged tone (21) when followed by Tone 1, Tone 2, or Tone 4 (half-third tone sandhi), and Tone 3 is replaced by Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (third tone sandhi). In the half-third sandhi block, disyllabic targets with a half-third (21) or full-third (213) tone FIRST syllable and a Tone 2 (35) or Tone 4 (51) second syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. In the third tone sandhi block, third-tone sandhi disyllabic targets with a half-third or full-third SECOND syllable were preceded by either a half-third prime, a full-third prime, or a control prime. Results showed that both half-third and full-third primes elicited significantly faster reaction times relative to the control Tone 1 condition. The size of the facilitation was not influenced by prime condition, target frequency, targets’ first syllable tone or targets’ second syllable tone. These data suggest that Mandarin T3 may be a more abstract tone and stored as the first syllable for both types of sandhi words. Keywords Mandarin · Tone sandhi · Phonological alternation · Priming · Lexical representation
* Hanbo Yan [email protected] 1
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
2
Department of Modern Languages, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA
3
School of Chinese Studies and Exchange, Shanghai International Studies University, Room 418, Building 2, Number 550 West Dalian Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai 200083, China
4
Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Introduction Variability in the acoustic signal of spoken words poses challenges for how the human brain succeeds during verbal communication. Variations in speech due to factors such as speech rate, speaker identity, co-articulation, and phonological alternation (Weber and Scharenborg 2012) contribute to the mismatch between the surface acoustic signal that the listener hears and the stored representation in the listeners’ mental lexicon. To understand this mapping, spoken word recognition models differ in the degree of abstractness of the stored representations. On the one hand, it is claimed that listeners filter surface variability and extract abstract linguistic units such as phonemes or phonetic features (Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson 1996, 1998;
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