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

Abstract

Languages may differ regarding the primary mental unit of phonological encoding in spoken production, with models of speakers of Indo‐European languages generally assuming a central role for phonemes, but spoken Chinese production potentially attributing a more prominent role to syllables. In the present study, native Mandarin Chinese speakers named objects that were preceded by briefly presented and masked prime words, which were form related and either matched or mismatched concerning their syllabic structure, or were unrelated. Behavioral results showed a previously reported interaction between prime and target syllable type. Concurrently recorded EEG also exhibited this interaction and further revealed that syllable overlap modulated ERPs mainly in the time window of 300–400 ms after picture onset. By contrast, phonemic overlap modulated ERPs from 500 ms to 600 ms. This pattern might suggest that speakers retrieved syllables before phonemes and strengthens the claim that for Chinese individuals syllables constitute primary functional representations (“proximate units”).

Word frequency effect in written production: Evidence from ERPs and neural oscillations

“…The present findings of theta modulation by WF invites a question of whether the syllable‐chunking mechanism found in speech perception also played, more or less, a role in the process of outputting monosyllabic orthographic codes. On one hand, a line of evidence found that access to orthographic codes depends on prior activation of phonological codes (e.g., Bonin, Peereman, et al., 2001; Qu et al., 2011), whose proximate unit are syllables in the case of Chinese characters (Cai et al., 2020; Chen & Chen, 2013; Zhang & Damian, 2019). And theta oscillation has been associated with syllable retrieval in Chinese spoken production (Jiang et al., 2020).…”

Phonological network fluency identifies phonological restructuring through mental search

“…Over the last decade, however, evidence has mounted for cross-linguistic differences. Evidence from error analyses in Mandarin Chinese 8–10 , and studies implementing priming paradigms in Mandarin 11–17 , and Japanese 18,19 , showed a lack of segmental processing, motivating the claim that the first likely phonological unit for retrieval, called the ‘proximate unit’, is syllabic in Mandarin, moraic in Japanese and segmental in Dutch, English and French.…”

Tone slips in Cantonese: Evidence for early phonological encoding

“…One event-related potential (ERP) study replicated null effects of segmental priming in behavior, but did show segmental priming in ERPs (Qu, Damian, & Kazanina, 2012), while other ERP studies have reinforced the idea that syllables are a salient planning unit (Wang, Wong, Wang, and Chen (2017); A. W.-K. Wong, Chiu, Wang, Wong, and Chen (2018). Recent work suggests ERP indices for both syllable and segment retrieval are observable, with syllable-related components occurring prior to phoneme-related components in time (Qu et al, 2012;Zhang & Damian, 2019).…”