Processing Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi at the Morphosyntactic Interface: Reduplication and Lexical Compounds.

Feier Gao,Chien-Jer Charles Lin,Siqi Lyu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713665

Feier Gao, Chien-Jer Charles Lin + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.713665

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Abstract

Mandarin tone 3 sandhi is a phonological alternation in which the initial tone 3 (i.e., low tone) syllable changes to a tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) when followed by another tone 3. The present study used a cross-modal syllable-morpheme matching experiment to examine how native speakers process the sandhi sequences derived from verb reduplication and compounding, respectively. Embedded in a visually-presented sentential context, a disyllabic sequence containing a sandhi target was displayed simultaneously with a monosyllabic audio, either a tone 1 (i.e., high-level tone), tone 2 (i.e., rising tone) or tone 3 (i.e., low tone), and participants judged whether the audio syllable matched the visual morpheme. Results showed that the tone 3 sandhi was processed differently in the two constructions. The underlying tone and the surface tone were co-activated and competed with each other in sandhi compounds whereas predominant activation of the underlying tone, over the surface tone, was observed in reduplication. The processing of tone 3 sandhi offers support for distinctive morphological structures: a lexical compound is represented both as a whole-word unit and as a combination of two individual morphemes whereas a verb reduplication is represented and accessed as a monomorphemic unit in the mental lexicon.

Highlights

IntroductionLanguage users access a word by mapping the speech input to the stored representation
During spoken word recognition, language users access a word by mapping the speech input to the stored representation
The current study aims to investigate how native speakers represent and access the underlying and the surface representations at the suprasegmental level—tonal representation in Mandarin Chinese

Summary

Introduction

Language users access a word by mapping the speech input to the stored representation. Acoustic input often deviates from its phonemic representation due to factors such as speech rate, speaker characteristics, co-articulation, and phonological alternation (Weber and Scharenborg, 2012). Morphemes undergoing phonological alternations surface as different allomorphs in the specific phonological environments, and the underlyingsurface mismatch thereby creates challenges to morpheme recognition (e.g., dog[z], cat[s], bus[iz]). When processing phonologically alternated sequences in connected speech, the acoustic input itself is often insufficient for spoken word recognition (e.g., Nolan, 1992; Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson, 1996). The current study aims to investigate how native speakers represent and access the underlying and the surface representations at the suprasegmental level—tonal representation in Mandarin Chinese.

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