Refereed journal article or data article (A1)
The role of tonal information during spoken-word recognition in Chinese: Evidence from a printed-word eye-tracking study
List of Authors: Shen Wei, Hyönä Jukka, Wang Youxi, Hou Meiling, Zhao Jing
Publisher: SPRINGER
Publication year: 2021
Journal: Memory and Cognition
Journal name in source: MEMORY & COGNITION
Journal acronym: MEM COGNITION
Volume number: 49
Start page: 181
End page: 192
Number of pages: 12
ISSN: 0090-502X
eISSN: 1532-5946
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01070-0
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/49434249
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., (sic),xiang4xian4, "quadrant"), a tone-consistent phonological competitor (e.g., (sic), xiang4ce4, "photo album"), or a tone-inconsistent phonological competitor (e.g., ,xiang1cai4, "coriander"), and two unrelated distractors. Simultaneously, they were asked to listen to a spoken target word presented in isolation (Experiment1) or embedded in neutral/predictive sentence contexts (Experiment2), 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 tone-inconsistent 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.
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