Experimental evidence: Directionality preference of tone absorption

Abstract

Tone absorption is a very common tone alternation process in African and Asian tone languages, in which a part of the contour tone is absorbed byanother tone, and this process can take place in two directions. Typologically, right-dominant tone absorption is much more attested than the left-dominantcounterpart, although both are predicted possible. Such typological asymmetry hypothesizes the argument that there is a learnability difference between left- and right-dominant absorption. Specifically, given that the two patterns are equally complex, we hypothesized the difference is due to variations in phonetic groundedness. An artificial language learning paradigm was used for this study. We extracted possible tone absorption patterns from Tianjin Mandarin with reference to the Cantonese tonal inventory and designed an artificial language incorporating these absorption patterns. 56 native Cantonese participants took part in a word naming task, consisting of a pretest, a learning, and a test phase. They were taught a monosyllabic name of a color, and a monosyllabic name of a monster, and asked to combine them to form a disyllabic compound. Results showed that the right-dominant learners had significantly higher accuracy rates after learning. The analysis of reaction time (RT) revealed that right-dominant learners had significantly shorter RTs than the left-dominant group learners. Both findings showed that right-dominant tone absorption was better learned, suggesting that it is a universal directionality preference.