Processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental information in English and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In this study, a Garner selective attention task is used to identify cross-linguistic differences in attention to vowels, consonants and tones. In previous research, Tong et al. (2008) reported that, in Mandarin Chinese, consonantal and vocalic variability interfered more with tone processing than vice versa (asymmetric integrality), in contrast with the findings of earlier studies (Lee & Nusbaum, 1993; Repp & Lin, 1990). However, while these earlier studies examined both English and Mandarin Chinese listeners, Tong et al. (2008) did not study English speakers because of cross-linguistic differences in tone discrimination. The present study extends this work to examine interactions between these properties in English as well as Mandarin Chinese, using stimuli in which the consonantal, vocalic and tonal differences are linguistically meaningful in both languages, and normalizing for cross-linguistic differences in discriminability. It is predicted that Chinese results will replicate those of Tong, et al. (2008), while English listeners may show more symmetric integrality between segmental and tonal information than in previous studies since these pitch contours are prosodically meaningful and corrected for discriminability. Results will be discussed with respect to the role that linguistic knowledge plays in determining processing dependencies between segmental and suprasegmental information.