Phonological encoding in Vietnamese: An experimental investigation

Abstract

In English, Dutch, and other Germanic languages the initial phonological unit used in word production has been shown to be the phoneme; conversely, others have revealed that in Chinese this is the atonal syllable and in Japanese the mora. The current paper is, to our knowledge, the first to report chronometric data on Vietnamese phonological encoding. Vietnamese, a tonal language, is of interest as, despite its Austroasiatic roots, it has clear similarities with Chinese through extended contact over a prolonged period. Four experiments (i.e., masked priming, phonological Stroop, picture naming with written distractors, picture naming with auditory distractors) have been conducted to investigate Vietnamese phonological encoding. Results show that in all four experiments both onset effects as well as whole syllable effects emerge. This indicates that the fundamental phonological encoding unit during Vietnamese language production is the phoneme despite its apparent similarities to Chinese. This result might have emerged due to tone assignment being a qualitatively different process in Vietnamese compared to Chinese.

Language generality in phonological encoding: Moving beyond Indo‐European languages

“…In contrast, Verdonschot et al. (2022) argue that Vietnamese deploys proximate phonemic segments, like Indo‐European languages. Likewise, Winskel and Ratitamkul (2020) concluded, based on masked priming evidence, that phonemes are primary units in Thai.…”

“…Research has recently expanded to other East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, including Korean (Han & Verdonschot, 2019; Li et al., 2022; Verdonschot et al., 2021), Vietnamese (Verdonschot et al., 2022), and Thai (Winskel & Ratitamkul, 2020). This research is on‐going, but results to‐date suggest parallels in terms of the proximate units discussed above.…”

Phonological encoding in Tongan: An experimental investigation

“…All stimuli were created by a native Tongan speaker. We opted to use non-words as distractors as there are currently no lexical characteristics databases available for Tongan and non-words have been shown to be effective in eliciting responses (e.g., Verdonschot et al, 2019Verdonschot et al, , 2021Verdonschot et al, , 2022.…”

“…Therefore, we have chosen non-words as distractors as they are proposed to directly activate IPUs in the production network while reducing lexical influences. Employing PWIs with non-word distractors has been carried out several times before (see Verdonschot et al, 2019 for a similar experiments in Japanese; Verdonschot et al, 2021 for Vietnamese; and Verdonschot et al, 2022 for Korean) although it should be noted that task might be susceptible to orthographic confounds…”