PMID: 2485849Oct 1, 1989Paper

Prosodic structure in language understanding: evidence from tone sandhi in Mandarin

Language and Speech
S R SpeerM L Slowiaczek

Abstract

Two experiments show that prosodic information plays a crucial role in the processing of sentences of Standard Mandarin Chinese, where local lexical ambiguities may occur due to the operation of a tone sandhi rule. In Chinese, each word is associated with a tone; in this paper, the term "Mandarin tone sandhi" refers to a phonological rule that changes the first of two consecutive low tones (Tone 3) to a rising tone (Tone 2). As a result, a two-syllable sequence with a rising tone followed by a low tone is ambiguous. In Experiment 1, listeners identified lexical tones for ambiguous, unambiguous, and nonsense words in phrasal contexts where the tone sandhi rule might have applied. Comparable results in the lexical versus nonsense conditions indicate that judgments did not rely simply on lexically stored tonal information, but also made reference to the tonal context of the phrase. In Experiment 2, subjects chose the most likely written English translation for auditory sentences of Mandarin. Global prosodic information was manipulated to create different levels of "prosodic closeness" between two critical items in a tone sandhi environment, while the syntactic relation between these items was held constant. Results show that liste...Continue Reading

References

Dec 1, 1978·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·L A Streeter
Sep 1, 1977·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·W E Cooper, J M Sorensen
Sep 1, 1967·Journal of Speech and Hearing Research·W S Wang, K P Li
Jul 1, 1975·Multivariate Behavioral Research·K D Bird

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Citations

Feb 1, 1997·Perception & Psychophysics·A Cutler, H C Chen
May 6, 2008·Ear and Hearing·Ning ZhouLi Xu
Sep 1, 1996·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·Y S LeeL H Wurm
Dec 3, 2017·The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America·Ping TangKatherine Demuth
Apr 1, 1997·Language and Speech·A CutlerW van Donselaar
Dec 8, 2004·Language and Speech·Siyun Liu, Arthur G Samuel

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