The Contribution of Aspirated Feature Information of Initial in Mandarin-Chinese Monosyllable Word Processing

Abstract

The passage mainly focuses on aspirated feature of stop consonants priming effect in Mandarin-Chinese monosyllable real spoken words. The experiment contrasted 4 prime conditions of prime-target pairs: homogeneous (pa1-pa1), aspirated feature (pha1-pa1), post-homogeneous (ma1-pa1) and unrelated (lu1-pa1). In the experiment, all tonal information is matched and the aspirated feature of initial in Mandarin-Chinese monosyllable real spoken words is the variant. The latter two pairs are control groups. The data were from ten Mandarin native listeners, then they were calculated and got the mean reaction time (RT), the standard deviation (std) and standard error (std. err). By comparing with the unrelated group, the other three shows that if some segmental information are matched, there will be significant negative priming effect. The first two pairs test whether aspirated feature activate priming effect at word recognition in Mandarin-Chinese monosyllable real spoken words by auditory priming, by comparing the homogeneous (H) group with the aspirated group and post-homogeneous group, the result shows that changing the aspirated feature do have a positive priming effect.