What is in the neighborhood of a tonal syllable? Evidence from auditory lexical decision in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Phonological neighborhood effects have been found in spoken word recognition, word production and phonetic variation (Gahl, Yao, & Johnson, 2012; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Vitevitch, 2002). Overall, words from dense neighborhoods are harder to recognize but easier to produce. However, most previous studies have focused on English, while evidence suggests that these effects may not generalize cross-linguistically due to language-specific configurations of the lexicon (Michael S Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006, 2009). In the current study, we investigate the effects of phonological neighborhoods in Mandarin Chinese, which has a vastly different lexicon structure from that of English. Results from an auditory lexical decision experiment showed that phonological neighborhood density and neighbor frequency (defined by the one-phoneme/tone difference rule) are predictive of the speed and accuracy of lexical decision. Homophone density also has a facilitative effect on the accuracy of lexical decision. The implications of the current findings are discussed in the framework of the lexicon model proposed by Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (1994, 2009).

The effects of lexical frequency and homophone neighborhood density on incomplete tonal neutralization

“…When examining homophone neighborhood density, it can be seen that the individual tones were hyper-articulated with a longer duration and a later F0 turning point in syllables with high homophone neighborhood density. To understand the patterns, it may be necessary to employ several models from the literature, namely the Neighborhood Activation Model and the communication-based accounts (e.g., Luce, 1986 ; Goldinger et al, 1989 ; Vitevitch and Sommers, 2003 ; Baus et al, 2008 ; Taler et al, 2010 ; Chen and Mirman, 2012 ; Gahl and Strand, 2016 ; Yao and Sharma, 2017 ; Arutiunian and Lopukhina, 2020 ; Karimi and Diaz, 2020 ). A crucial assumption of the Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM) is that the activation and inhibition of the target words during speech processing.…”

“…This draws upon evidence from lexical decision tasks, naming reaction times, and familiarity rating. Yao and Sharma (2017) have proposed that in tonal languages, such as Mandarin, to define phonological neighbors by the one-phoneme/tone difference rule: any two syllables that only differ in one phoneme or tone are phonological neighbors. Given the abundant Mandarin homophones (i.e., monosyllabic morphemes with the same segmental syllables and tone), psycholinguistic studies on Chinese spoken word production/recognition often employ the notion of homophone neighbors (e.g., Chen et al, 2009Chen et al, , 2016Wang et al, 2012), including only words that share both segments and tone.…”

Modelling Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge

“…It is defined as the number of words generated by substituting, deleting or adding a single phoneme together with their summed frequency (Greenberg & Jenkins 1964). Even though the stimulus construction process ignored tonal distinctions, they were taken into consideration when searching for lexical neighbours, as previous work has shown that including tonal neighbours in neighbourhood density counts improves the correlation between neighbourhood density and reaction time in lexical decision tasks (Yao & Sharma 2017). For example, the form [ku1] would have [ku3] and [ku4] as its neighbours.…”

Effects of Homophone Density on Spoken Word Recognition in Mandarin Chinese

“…In comparison, Yao and Sharma [13] investigated the effects of homophone density using an auditory lexical decision task in Mandarin Chinese. Their findings revealed a facilitatory effect of homophone density on accuracy.…”