Lexical tone in spoken word recognition: A view from Manadarin Chinese.
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TextDescription: 147 pISBN: 0599941294Subject(s): Psychology, Cognitive | Language, Linguistics | 0633 | 0290Dissertation note: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2000. Summary: Prosodic features of speech are used by some languages to distinguish words. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, segmentally identical words are distinguished by lexical tones, which are realized as distinct fundamental frequency patterns over a syllable. Since tone is used phonemically in this language, the question arises of whether tone is implicated in lexical processes in the same way as segmental structure. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the role of Mandarin tones in lexical activation and competition. The direct-form and mediated-form priming experiments showed that Mandarin listeners exploited lexical tone on-line to disambiguate words that were segmentally identical but tonally distinct. In addition, acoustic similarity between tones modulated the magnitude of priming, and generated opposite priming patterns between the two priming experiments. The interplay of lexical activation and inhibition, based on a neural network model of lexical access (McNellis & Blumstein, 2000), was invoked to account for the contrasting results. The gating experiment showed later recognition for words with tonal minimal pairs in the lexical neighborhood. It is concluded that lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese participates in lexical activation and competition as does segmental structure, and that the mapping of tonal information to the lexicon is based on the acoustic similarity between tones.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-09, Section: B, page: 5019.
Adviser: Sheila E. Blumstein.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2000.
Prosodic features of speech are used by some languages to distinguish words. In Mandarin Chinese, for example, segmentally identical words are distinguished by lexical tones, which are realized as distinct fundamental frequency patterns over a syllable. Since tone is used phonemically in this language, the question arises of whether tone is implicated in lexical processes in the same way as segmental structure. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate the role of Mandarin tones in lexical activation and competition. The direct-form and mediated-form priming experiments showed that Mandarin listeners exploited lexical tone on-line to disambiguate words that were segmentally identical but tonally distinct. In addition, acoustic similarity between tones modulated the magnitude of priming, and generated opposite priming patterns between the two priming experiments. The interplay of lexical activation and inhibition, based on a neural network model of lexical access (McNellis & Blumstein, 2000), was invoked to account for the contrasting results. The gating experiment showed later recognition for words with tonal minimal pairs in the lexical neighborhood. It is concluded that lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese participates in lexical activation and competition as does segmental structure, and that the mapping of tonal information to the lexicon is based on the acoustic similarity between tones.
School code: 0024.
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