Sandhi-tone words prolong fixation duration during silent sentence reading in Chinese
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Sandhi‑tone words prolong fixation duration during silent sentence reading in Chinese Jinger Pan1 · Caicai Zhang2 · Xunan Huang2 · Ming Yan3 Accepted: 16 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The current study examined whether or not lexical access is influenced by detailed phonological features during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. We used two types of two-character target words (Mandarin sandhi-tone and base-tone). The first characters of the words in the sandhi-tone condition had a tonal alternation, but no tonal alternation was involved in the base-tone condition. Recordings of eye movements revealed that native Mandarin Chinese readers viewed the base-tone target words more briefly than the sandhi-tone target words when they were infrequent. Such articulation-specific effects on visual word processing, however, diminished for frequent words. We suggest that a conflict in tonal representation at a character/ morpheme level and at a word level induces prolongation in fixation duration on infrequent sandhi-tone words, and conclude that these tonal effects appear to reflect articulation simulation of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. Keywords Eye movement · Tone sandhi · Sentence reading · Chinese
Introduction During the reading of continuous text, sound-defining properties of orthographic patterns are activated automatically for readers’ lexical processing. One topic that has been under considerable debate is whether or not detailed phonological features are used during visual word identification. One one hand, according to the minimality hypothesis (Frost, 1998), the early use of phonological codes * Ming Yan [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR, China
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Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies and Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
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Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR, China
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during visual word recognition implies that the effective phonological form must be simple and abstract, devoid of speech-specific features including articulation specific sub- and supra-phonemic variations. The hypothesis suggests that the use of phonological knowledge for visual word recognition has little in common with the use of acoustic features for auditory word recognition. On the other hand, a number of recent studies have showed that readers of alphabetic languages use relatively detailed phonological features, such as vowel duration, spoken syllable boundaries, and lexical stress, during visual word identification (e.g., Huestegge, 2010; Inhoff, Connine, & Radach, 2002). For instance, there have been reports of shorter reaction times to target words pronounced with short vowels (e.g., “deaf”) than to orthographically matched words with long vowels (e.g., “deal”; c.f., Abramson & Goldinger,
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