Constructing initial phonology in Mandarin Chinese: Syllabic or subsyllabic? A masked priming investigation

Abstract

Recent research has put forward the idea that Chinese speech production is governed by the syllable as the fundamental phonological unit. However, it may be that onset priming might be more difficult to obtain in Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, in this study, the degree of overlap between prime and target was increased from C to CV (i.e., extending beyond the phoneme) as well as whether primes and targets had an overlapping structure (CV vs. CVN). Subsyllabic priming effects were found (i.e., onset + vowel overlap but not purely onset overlap), contrasting with the claim that the syllable is the compulsory building block in the initial construction of Mandarin Chinese phonology.

Phonology contributes to writing: evidence from a masked priming task

“…The prime duration used in our first experiment (58 ms) is fairly representative of numerous masked priming studies in alphabetic (e.g. Adelman et al, 2014;Forster & Davis, 1984) and non-alphabetic languages (Chen, Lin, & Ferrand, 2003;Shen & Forster, 1999;Verdonschot, Lai, Chen, Tamaoka, & Schiller, 2015;Xia & Andrews, 2015;You, Zhang, & Verdonschot, 2012). In our second experiment, we used a prime duration (33 ms) which was considerably shorter than the one conventionally used.…”

Syllables constitute proximate units for Mandarin speakers: Electrophysiological evidence from a masked priming task

“…Using the picture-word interference task and speakers of Cantonese, Wong and Chen (2008) found significant facilitation effects when the target and the distractor word shared a syllable or when they shared the syllable plus tone. Critically, these authors also observed significant facilitation when only the rhyme was shared (experiment 5 using auditory distractors) or when rhyme plus tone were shared (experiment 2 using visual distracters; see Wong & Chen, 2009, for related results as well as Verdonschot, Lai, Feng, Tamaoka, & Schiller, 2015, for results with Chinese-English bilinguals). In a study reported by Qu, Damian, and Kazanina (2012), Mandarin native speakers named colored line drawings of objects using adjective-noun phrases, and color and object name either shared the initial phoneme, or not.…”

Across the great divide: Proximate units at the lexical‐phonological interface

“…Crucially, supraphonemic units produce form preparation benefits in Chinese and Japanese, but, in contrast to Indo-European languages, speakers of these languages do not show benefits of word-initial single phonemes. This is a compelling and counter-intuitive finding, particularly given that phonemic errors do occur in these same languages (Chen, 1993;Kubozono, 1989;see O'Séaghdha et al, 2010) and that bilingual speakers of these languages do show onset preparation effects in English (see Verdonschot, Lai, Chen, Tamaoka, & Schiller, 2015). Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002) were the first to show that speakers of Mandarin Chinese did not show preparation of the initial consonants of disyllabic words.…”