The representation of variable tone sandhi patterns in Shanghai Wu

Abstract

Disyllabic verb-noun (V-N) items in Shanghai Wu have variable surface tone patterns: They can undergo either a rightward extension tone sandhi, which extends the lexical tone of the first syllable over the entire word, or tonal reduction on the first syllable. The current study investigates how the phonological properties of these alternation processes as well as variation influence how Shanghai speakers represent and access such words. We conducted an auditoryauditory priming lexical decision experiment on Shanghai V-N items that can undergo either tonal extension or tonal reduction with native Shanghai speakers. Each disyllabic target was preceded by monosyllabic primes with the canonical tone, the tonal-extension tone, the surface tone, or a tone unrelated to the tone of the first syllable of the targets. Results showed both canonical and tonal-extension priming effects, but no surface priming effect. Moreover, although more familiar V-Ns were recognized with shorter reaction time, the priming effect did not interact with speakers' familiarity ratings or sandhi preference ratings of the targets. These data are consistent with the interpretation that both the canonical and tonal-extension forms are represented in Shanghai speakers' mental lexicon due to tone sandhi variation, but the representation does not seem to be modulated by the frequencies of the variants. Also, together with findings from auditory priming studies of other tone sandhi patterns, the current study suggests that certain phonological properties of an alternation, such as its locality and transparency, influence the representation of words undergoing the alternation; but whether the alternation is structurepreserving does not seem to impact the representation.

Encoding category-level and context-specific phonological information at different stages: An EEG study of Mandarin third-tone sandhi word production

“…However, since there are many different types of phonological alternations (Bürki, 2018;Bürki et al, 2010Bürki et al, , 2011Bürki et al, , 2014Bürki and Gaskell, 2012), it remains to be investigated how the current results generalize to other types of phonological alternations. Even regarding tone sandhi, some recent research suggests that different processing mechanisms may be involved in the tone sandhi processing in other Chinese dialects (Chang et al, 2019;Chien et al, 2017;Yan et al, 2020Yan et al, , 2021. Moreover, the application of tone sandhi is also subject to other factors such as morphosyntactic structure and prosodic structure (Chen, 2000), and recent research suggests that the processing of disyllabic Mandarin T3 sandhi words with different morphological structures (e.g., lexical compounds vs. reduplication) may also differ (Gao et al, 2021).…”

A preliminary study on the online processing of anticipatory tonal coarticulation – Evidence from eye movements

“…So far, the very limited number of studies regarding tone perception in connected speech have mainly focused on the question of how listeners perceive lexical tones undergoing tone sandhi processes, or in other words, whether the sandhi-derived tones are identified or represented as another lexical tone within the tonal inventory of a language such as Standard Chinese (e.g., Wang and Li, 1967 ; Speer et al, 1989 ; Zhou and Marslen-Wilson, 1997 ; Chien et al, 2016 ; Meng et al, 2021 ; Yan et al, 2021 ; Tu and Chien, 2022 ). Far less attention has been paid to the perception of lexical tones that show f0 variation due to tonal coarticulation, which is however a more oft-seen phenomenon when tones are combined.…”