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

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.

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

“…On the other hand, by extending this body of literature, our results showed, for the first time, that in the online processing of coarticulated tones, listeners do not just passively wait for the tonal contexts, but rather actively utilize the heard coarticulated cues and update the activation level of the lexical tones in real time before the tonal contexts are available. Moreover, while various studies have suggested the necessity of including canonical lexical tones in the existing models of spoken word recognition (e.g., Malins and Joanisse, 2010 ; Yang and Chen, 2022 ; Zou et al, 2022 for the TRACE model), the present study further implied that the contextual variation of lexical tones should also be adequately considered.…”

“…Only the end-state responses were recorded, which have been known to exhibit quite different patterns from the real-time processing in spoken word recognition (e.g., Spivey, 2008 ). While accumulated evidence has shown that just like segments, monosyllabic lexical tones are incrementally processed as the heard speech signals unfold (e.g., Malins and Joanisse, 2010 ; Yang and Chen, 2022 ; Zou et al, 2022 ), it is still unknown how listeners process the coarticulated tones, which are typically surfaced with distorted f0 and thus not the best exemplars of the tones as those over monosyllabic words.…”

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

“…According to information-theoretic methods ( Garner and Miller, 1988 ; Tong et al, 2008 ), in the context of word recognition, the ability of a given signal to constrain recognition is related to its probability of occurring in a corresponding communication system. Due to the small tone inventory compared to that of the segments, each tone occurs more frequently and associates with more words in Mandarin Chinese than consonants and rimes, which makes tone less informative and poorer at constraining word recognition ( Tong et al, 2008 ; Zou et al, 2021 ). Therefore, L2 learners may make less effort on the learning of this unfamiliar suprasegmental contrast which is less informative in constraining word identification compared to segments.…”

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

“…According to informationtheoretic methods (Garner and Miller, 1988;Tong et al, 2008), in the context of word recognition, the ability of a given signal to constrain recognition is related to its probability of occurring in a corresponding communication system. Due to the small tone inventory compared to that of the segments, each tone occurs more frequently and associates with more words in Mandarin Chinese than consonants and rimes, which makes tone less informative and poorer at constraining word recognition (Tong et al, 2008;Zou et al, 2021). Therefore, L2 learners may make less effort on the learning of this unfamiliar suprasegmental contrast which is less informative in constraining word identification compared to segments.…”