Abstract
This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime, and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers (all born and grew up in Beijing) were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word (e.g., tang2 “candy”), nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the target: consonant competitor (e.g., ti1 “ladder”), rime competitor (e.g., lang4 “wave”), tone competitor (e.g., niu2 “cow”), consonant plus rime competitor (e.g., tang1”soup”), consonant plus tone competitor (e.g., tou2 “head”), rime plus tone competitor (e.g., yang2 “sheep”), cohort competitor (e.g., ta3 “tower”), cohort plus tone competitor (e.g., tao2 “peach”), and baseline competitor (e.g., xue3 “snow”). A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that (1) competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. (2) Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; (3) like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components.
Highlights
Spoken word recognition forms the basis of auditory language comprehension
Our results showed that for a target word both consonant plus rime competitors and cohort plus tone competitors exhibited a comparable great effect of activation, but the rime plus tone competitors were activated to a much less degree compared with the other “neighbors,” which is at odds with the prediction of neighborhood activation model (NAM) (Figure 10)
The immediate use of consonant and rime information to modulate the dynamics of lexical competition found in the current study clearly suggests an incremental nature, which is different from the global processing view of NAM and the holistic fashion of Mandarin word processing proposed in previous studies (e.g., Zhao et al, 2011)
Summary
Spoken word recognition forms the basis of auditory language comprehension. As the studies investigating real-time spoken word recognition accumulate, it is becoming increasingly clear that with the unfolding of the input, multiple words can be activated in parallel to competing during the recognition process (Frauenfelder and Tyler, 1987). The relative importance of onset and rime in Mandarin spoken word recognition still needs further investigation (Zhao et al, 2011; Malins and Joanisse, 2012a; Zou, 2017). Accounts on the nature of Mandarin word processing are inconclusive, with some studies supporting an incremental fashion (e.g., Malins and Joanisse, 2012a; Ho et al, 2019), while others suggesting a holistic way of processing and emphasizing the special status of syllables (e.g., Zhao et al, 2011; Gao et al, 2019)
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