In Mandarin Chinese, speakers benefit from fore-knowledge of what the first syllable but not of what the first phonemic segment of a disyllabic word will be (Chen, J.-Y., Chen, T.-M. & Dell, 2002), contrasting with findings in English, Dutch, and other Indo-European languages, and challenging the generality of current theories of word production. In this article, we extend the evidence for the language difference by showing that failure to prepare onsets in Mandarin (Experiment 1) applies even to simple monosyllables (Experiments 2-4), and confirm the contrast with English for comparable materials (Experiments 5, 6). We also provide new evidence that Mandarin speakers do reliably prepare tonally unspecified phonological syllables (Experiment 7). To account for these patterns, we propose a language general proximate units principle whereby intentional preparation for speech as well as phonological-lexical coordination are grounded at the first phonological level below the word at which explicit unit selection occurs. The language difference arises because syllables are proximate units in Mandarin Chinese, whereas segments are proximate in English and other Indo-European languages. The proximate units perspective reconciles the aspiration toward a language general account of word production with the reality of substantial cross-linguistic differences.

Previous word production research employing the implicit-priming paradigm has shown that speakers can benefit from advance knowledge of the initial word form of the word to be produced. In Dutch and English, a single onset segment is sufficient to produce the benefit, but a complete syllable (without the tone) is required in Mandarin Chinese. These findings have been interpreted as suggesting language-dependent proximate units for word-form encoding, which are intrinsic to a language-specific system. Nonetheless, the absence of a segment effect in Mandarin Chinese might have to do with the orthographic characteristics of the prompts, which are syllable-based and could have motivated the production system to place more emphasis on the syllable than on the segment. Two experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we employed the implicitpriming paradigm with both spoken and written prompts, and in Experiment 2 we adopted a picture version of this paradigm. Spoken prompts are less likely to encourage an orthographically induced syllable bias, and picture naming involves no prompts, leaving no room for any syllable bias that prompts might induce. The results from both experiments showed syllable preparation effects but no segment preparation effects, regardless of whether prompts were written, spoken, or absent. These findings suggest that the syllable as the proximate unit in Mandarin Chinese word production is an intrinsic, and not an accidental or task-dependent, property of the production system. Keywords Mandarin Chinese . Word production . Proximate unit . Implicit priming Producing a word involves accessing its abstract phonological contents from the mental lexicon and assembling them into units of the proper size, so that these units can be mapped onto articulatory movements during speaking. This process is known as word-form encoding. According to the word production model proposed by Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999), the phonological contents selected at the beginning of word-form encoding are segments rather than syllables. The syllables are constructed online via a segment-to-frame association procedure. This proposal is consistent with the phonological characteristics of the languages that the model is built upon-that is, Dutch and English-in which resyllabification is often required in connected speech, such that the syllables of a word are best constructed online rather than stored and retrieved. The main evidence supporting the segment as the first unit selected for word-form encoding in Dutch and English has been obtained with the implicitpriming task. In this task, participants repeatedly name a set of words, which do or do not overlap in their initial segment (s). Consistent segment preparation effects (i.e., faster response times when there was overlapping than when there was not) have been observed, and these effects increased with

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and thus guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that they are also activated automatically by word perception. Therefore, in contrast to Indo-European languages, syllables but not necessarily subsyllabic components such as initial consonants can be perceptually primed in production. We tested this prediction in two masked-priming experiments. To isolate relevant phonological activation originating in primes, we used single character masked primes whose corresponding tones and lexical meanings always differed from those of the targets’ first morphemes. Related primes potentially activated the atonal first syllables or the first consonants of target words. To strongly engage production-specific processes, we used pictures as prompts for disyllabic target words. Facilitation relative to unrelated controls was observed only in the syllable sharing condition. If anything, sharing of initial consonants had a negative valence, perhaps indicative of competition among similar co-activated words or syllables. These findings corroborate the view that abstract syllables are the first selected, proximate phonological units in Chinese word production, and that phonemic segments play a subordinate role.

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