The role of tonal information during spoken-word recognition in Chinese: Evidence from a printed-word eye-tracking study

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the extent to which the lexical tone can affect spoken-word recognition in Chinese using a printed-word paradigm. Participants were presented with a visual display of four words-namely, a target word (e.g., 象限, xiang4xian4, "quadrant"), a tone-consistent phonological competitor (e.g., 相册, xiang4ce4, "photo album"), or a tone-inconsistent phonological competitor (e.g., 香菜, xiang1cai4, "coriander"), and two unrelated distractors. Simultaneously, they were asked to listen to a spoken target word presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or embedded in neutral/predictive sentence contexts (Experiment 2), and then click on the target word on the screen. Results showed significant phonological competitor effects (i.e., the fixation proportion on the phonological competitor was higher than that on the distractors) under both tone conditions. Specifically, a larger phonological competitor effect was observed in the tone-consistent condition than in the toneinconsistent condition when the spoken word was presented in isolation and the neutral sentence contexts. This finding suggests a partial role of lexical tone in constraining spoken-word recognition. However, when embedded in a predictive sentence context, the phonological competitor effect was only observed in the tone-consistent condition and absent in the tone-inconsistent condition. This result indicates that the predictive sentence context can strengthen the role of lexical tone.Keywords Lexical tone . Spoken-word recognition . Sentence context . Chinese . Eye tracking Most spoken-word recognition models agree that with the unfolding of spoken stimuli, more than one word candidate sharing partial phonemic information with the target will be shortly activated for competition (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980;McClelland & Elman, 1986). For example, when listening to a spoken word "beaker", lexical candidates sharing a similar initial syllable (e.g., "beetle", "beef", "bee") will be

Does vowel harmony affect visual word recognition? Evidence from Finnish.

“…Finnish readers do encode (and use) vowel harmony information at a later processing stage, as we obtained clear evidence of an effect of vowel harmony when participants had to decide whether a letter string was a Finnish word or not (e.g., HÖPEÄ [harmonious pseudoword] produced longer "no" responses than HOPEÄ [disharmonious pseudoword]). Future research should examine the role of morpho-phonological features such as vowel harmony during word processing in sensory modalities that rely on serial input, such as reading VOWEL HARMONY AND WORD RECOGNITION 9 Finnish compound words in braille (see Fischer-Baum & Englebretson, 2016, for morphological effects in braille) or during spoken word recognition (e.g., using variants of the gating or visual world paradigms; e.g., Shen et al, 2021).…”

The Processing of the Second Syllable in Recognizing Chinese Disyllabic Spoken Words: Evidence From Eye Tracking

“…First, the lexical tone of the phonological competitors was not manipulated in the current study. One of our prior studies showed that lexical tone affects the degree of activation of cohort competitors ( Shen et al, 2020 ), and thus it remains unclear how the lexical tone of rhymes might modulate the activation degree of rhyme competitors. This should be investigated in future studies.…”

“…Studies have shown that phonological processing of words can be affected by the sentence predictability. For example, the lexical tone exhibits stronger constraining role during Chinese spoken word recognition in the predictive context compared to the neutral context or isolated word recognition; and a similar modulating role of lexical tone was found between the neutral context or isolated word recognition (Liu and Samuel, 2007;Shen et al, 2020). The mechanism underlying the prediction is assumed to be the pre-activation, that is, the activation occurs earlier before the presentation (Otten et al, 2007;Laszlo and Federmeier, 2009).…”

Syllable or phoneme? A mouse-tracking investigation of phonological units in Mandarin Chinese and English spoken word recognition.

“…Compared with English words, 72% of modern Mandarin Chinese words are formed by two syllables, 24.87% are multisyllabic words (11.53% are three-syllable, 10.45% are four-syllable, 2.89% are five-syllable words), and only 5.68% are monosyllabic words (Lexicon of Common Words in Contemporary Chinese Research Team, 2008). To date, most experimental studies investigating the phonological processing of word recognition (e.g., syllabic or tonal information) in non-Indo-European languages have predominantly relied on monosyllabic words (e.g., Lee, 2007; Li et al, 2013, 2019; Malins & Joanisse, 2010; Sereno & Lee, 2015; Shen et al, 2021; Yang & Chen, 2022 for Chinese), and relatively few exceptions used disyllabic words (e.g., Huang et al, 2016; Shen at al., 2018; Teruya & Kapatsinski, 2019; for Japanese; Tzeng et al, 2006; Wang et al, 2021; for Chinese). Given that Malins and Joanisse (2010) concluded that native Chinese listeners showed different levels of phonological competition among words sharing word-initial information versus words sharing word-final information in Chinese spoken word recognition, they only manipulated monosyllabic words instead of disyllabic words.…”

“…The current evidence concerning this issue is mixed (Shen et al, 2021). Several studies have demonstrated that tones played a comparable and strong role in constraining Chinese spoken word recognition compared with the syllables (e.g., Lee, 2007; Liu & Samuel, 2007; Malins et al, 2014; Malins & Joanisse, 2010, 2012; Schirmer et al, 2005; Shen et al, 2021; Zhao et al, 2011). However, the proposal of the strong role of lexical tones has been also challenged by some studies on Chinese spoken word recognition (e.g., Hu et al, 2012; Sereno & Lee, 2015; Taft & Chen, 1992; Tong et al, 2008; Wiener & Turnbull, 2016; Ye & Connine, 1999; Zou et al, 2022).…”