Modelling Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge

Gong, Shuxiao; Zhang, Jie

doi:10.1017/s0952675721000166

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 71 publications

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“…These syllables were all phonotactically legal. Some syllables were tonal gaps, i.e., syllables attested in other tones (e.g., gao R , which is not attested in standard Mandarin even though gao H is); others were accidental gaps, i.e., syllables not attested in any tone but also not violating any phonotactic constraint (e.g., neither tei H , tei R , tei L , nor tei F exist in standard Mandarin, even though there is no obvious general constraint barring the segmental sequence tei -e.g., dei is attested); see Gong & Zhang (2021) for further details on types of Mandarin pseudowords. These stimuli ensured a word-nonword ratio of 50% (96 critical targets, their 96 primes, plus 48 filler targets and their 48 primes, adds up to 288 words).…”

Section: Low-tone Target: Shimentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-lag identity priming in the absence of long-lag morphological priming: evidence from Mandarin tone alternation

Politzer-Ahles¹,

Pan²,

Lin³

et al. 2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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The present study tested whether listeners hearing one form of a morpheme activate other forms of the same morpheme. Listeners performed lexical decisions while hearing Mandarin monosyllables; crucially, critical targets could be primed by related syllables that occurred 18–52 trials earlier (long-lag priming). The use of long-lag priming ensures that any facilitation effects are due to morphological relatedness and not to semantic or form relationships, which do not prime lexical decisions at long lags. Across three experiments (total N = 458), we consistently found that lexical decisions were primed when the same pronunciation of a morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g., shiL – shiL) but were not primed when two different variants of the same morpheme occurred as prime and target (e.g., shiR – shiL, where both of these syllables are potential pronunciations of the same morpheme). In other words, we observed identity priming but not morphological priming, unlike other long-lag priming experiments, which almost invariably observe intramodal morphological priming if they test it. This surprising finding suggests that there are boundary conditions on the elicitation of long-lag morphological priming effects.

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Section: Low-tone Target: Shimentioning

confidence: 99%

Long-lag identity priming in the absence of long-lag morphological priming: evidence from Mandarin tone alternation

Politzer-Ahles¹,

Pan²,

Lin³

et al. 2023

Glossa Psycholinguistics

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Phonological Well-Formedness Constraints in Mandarin Phonotactics: Evidence From Lexical Decision

Gong

Zhang²,

Fiorentino

2023

Lang Speech

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This article investigates the role of phonological well-formedness constraints in Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic grammar and how they affect online speech processing. Mandarin non-words can be categorized into systematic gaps and accidental gaps, depending on whether they violate principled phonotactic constraints based on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). Non-word acceptability judgment experiments have shown that systematic gaps received lower wordlikeness ratings than accidental gaps. Using a lexical decision task, this study found that systematic gaps were rejected significantly faster than accidental gaps, even after lexical statistics were taken into account. These findings thus provide converging evidence for the essential status of the OCP-based phonotactic constraints in Mandarin speakers’ phonological knowledge.

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Identifying generalizable knowledge from the distribution of tonotactic accidental gaps in Mandarin

Jin,

Wang,

2023

Volume 14

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This study investigates tonotactic accidental gaps (unattested syllable-tone combinations) in Mandarin Chinese. In a corpus study, we found that, independent of syllable type, T2 (rising) and T3 (falling-rising) gaps were over-represented, whereas T1 (high level) and T4 (falling) gaps were under-represented. We also observed fewer T1 gaps with voiceless onsets and more T2 and T3 gaps with voiceless onsets, a pattern that is consistent with cross-linguistic observations. While these trends were generally reflected in a wordlikeness rating experiment by Mandarin listeners, their judgements of these gaps, similar to those of real words, were also guided by neighborhood density. Furthermore, T2 gaps with real-word T3 counterparts were rated as more wordlike, a result attributed to the T3 sandhi in Mandarin Chinese. Finally, we used harmonic scores generated from the UCLA Phonotactic Learner to explicitly test the role of lexical knowledge and markedness constraints in modeling speakers’ tonotactic knowledge reflected in the wordlikeness ratings. We found that grammars induced from lexical data were the most successful at predicting wordlikeness ratings of gaps and lexical syllables combined. However, when focused on the ratings of tonotactic gaps, grammars with markedness constraints informed by cross-linguistic observations were more successful even without the constraints being weighted on lexical data. The results show how lexical knowledge and universal markedness, which is not entirely learnable from the lexicon, may account for some tonotactic generalizations.

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Modelling Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge

Cited by 3 publications

References 71 publications

Long-lag identity priming in the absence of long-lag morphological priming: evidence from Mandarin tone alternation

Long-lag identity priming in the absence of long-lag morphological priming: evidence from Mandarin tone alternation

Phonological Well-Formedness Constraints in Mandarin Phonotactics: Evidence From Lexical Decision

Identifying generalizable knowledge from the distribution of tonotactic accidental gaps in Mandarin

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