The role of phonological alternation in speech production: Evidence from Mandarin tone Sandhi

Abstract

An open question in psycholinguistics is the nature of the phonological representations used during speech production and the processes that are applied to them, particularly between lexical access and articulatory implementation. While phonological theory posits that speakers' grammar includes mechanisms for transforming from input to output forms, whether such mechanisms also are used by the parser during online speech production is unclear. We examined the role of phonological alternations in Mandarin Chinese real and novel compounds using the implicit priming paradigm, which can reveal forms being used prior to articulation. We compared modulations of the implicit priming effect in sets of words that are heterogeneous at the lexical level (where one word has a different lexical tone than the rest) to those in sets that are heterogeneous at the derived level (where a word has the same underlying lexical tone, but that tone surfaces as a different tone because of tone sandhi). Both lexical and derived heterogeneous sets reduced the priming effect, suggesting that phonological alternation was computed abstractly before articulation was initiated. We argue that the progression from underlying phonological representations to articulatory execution may be mediated online by a level at which abstract phonological alternations are processed.