The Roles of Consonant, Rime, and Tone in Mandarin Spoken Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study

Swift Prosodic Modulation of Lexical Access: Brain Potentials From Three North Germanic Language Varieties

PURPOSE

According to most models of spoken word recognition, listeners probabilistically activate a set of lexical candidates, which is incrementally updated as the speech signal unfolds. Speech carries segmental (speech sound) as well as suprasegmental (prosodic) information. The role of the latter in spoken word recognition is less clear. We investigated how suprasegments (tone and voice quality) in three North Germanic language varieties affected lexical access by scrutinizing temporally fine-grained neurophysiological effects of lexical uncertainty and information gain.

METHOD

Three event-related potential (ERP) studies were reanalyzed. In all varieties investigated, suprasegments are associated with specific word endings. Swedish has two lexical "word accents" realized as pitch falls with different timings across dialects. In Danish, the distinction is in voice quality. We combined pronunciation lexica and frequency lists to calculate estimates of lexical uncertainty about an unfolding word and information gain upon hearing a suprasegmental cue and the segment upon which it manifests. We used single-trial mixed-effects regression models run every 4 ms.

RESULTS

Only lexical uncertainty showed solid results: a frontal effect at 150-400 ms after suprasegmental cue onset and a later posterior effect after 200 ms. While a model including only segmental information mostly performed better, it was outperformed by the suprasegmental model at 200-330 ms at frontal sites.

CONCLUSIONS

The study points to suprasegmental cues contributing to lexical access over and beyond segments after around 200 ms in the North Germanic varieties investigated. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a previously reported "pre-activation negativity" predominantly reflects forward-looking processing.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25016486.

A preliminary study on the online processing of anticipatory tonal coarticulation - Evidence from eye movements

While the f0 realization of lexical tones vary extensively in contexts, little has been known on how listeners process the variation in lexical tones due to contextual effects such as tonal coarticulation in spoken word recognition. This study thus aims to fill the knowledge gap in tone perception with evidence from two types of anticipatory tonal coarticulation effects in Tianjin Mandarin, i.e., the slope raising effect due to a following low-falling tone and the overall-height raising effect due to a following low-dipping tone. An eye-tracking experiment with the Visual World Paradigm was carried out to compare participants' eye movements when they heard targets in three types of anticipatory raising conditions, i.e., the Slope Raising condition, the Overall-height Raising condition, as well as the No Raising condition (the baseline). The eye movement results showed significant differences in the proportion of looks to target between the Slope Raising condition versus the other two conditions, whereas the Overall-height Raising condition did not differ significantly from the No Raising condition. The findings thus suggest the facilitatory effect of tonal coarticulation cues in the anticipation of the upcoming tones, but listeners in this study seemed to be only sensitive to the raising in the f0 slope rather than the overall raising in the f0 height.

Perception of Different Tone Contrasts at Sub-Lexical and Lexical Levels by Dutch Learners of Mandarin Chinese

This study explores the difficulties in distinguishing different lexical tone contrasts at both sub-lexical and lexical levels for beginning and advanced Dutch learners of Mandarin, using a sequence-recall task and an auditory lexical decision task. In both tasks, the Tone 2-Tone 3 contrast is most prone to errors for both groups of learners. A significant improvement in the advanced group was found for this tone contrast in the sub-lexical sequence recall task, but not in the lexical decision task. This is taken as evidence that utilizing tones in on-line spoken word recognition is more complex and demanding for L2 learners than in a memory-based task. The results of the lexical decision task also revealed that advanced learners have developed a stronger sensitivity to Tone 1 compared to the other three tones, with Tone 4 showing the least sensitivity. These findings suggest different levels of robustness and distinctiveness for the representation of different lexical tones in L2 learners' lexicon and consequently different levels of proficiency in integrating tones for lexical processing. The observed patterns of difficulty are potentially related to the acoustic characteristics of different lexical tone contrasts as well as to the interference of the suprasegmental features of learner's native language (i.e., the tonal contrasts of Dutch intonation) on the acquisition of the Mandarin lexical tone contrasts.