Bidialectal acoustic realization of tones is influenced by dialect experience and homophone status

Abstract

While evidence shows that interlingual cognates can enhance cross-language phonetic assimilation in production, it is reasonable to assume that interlingual homophones can enhance cross-language phonological interference. Distinct from cognates, interlingual homophones do not share semantic content, which may affect the degree of co-activation observed across languages. The present study examines this hypothesis in a group of bidialectal speakers, whose lexicon consists of a large number of inter-dialectal homophones. Productions of Chengdu Mandarin tones by Chengdu Mandarin and Standard Mandarin speakers were examined in a word naming task. The results showed that bidialectal speakers’ native tone productions were influenced by their experience in speaking Standard Mandarin as well as the inter-dialectal homophone status of the lexical item. Additionally, both of these influences were modulated by the structure of the inter-dialect tone categories. The findings support the similarity between bidialectal and bilingual speech processing and provide novel evidence for bilingual speech models from the level of suprasegmental processing.