Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Using two picture-naming experiments, this study investigated the role of lexical tone in Mandarin spoken word production. In both experiments, the target words were monosyllabic, and naming latency served as the dependent variable. Experiment 1, which used pictures as distractors, examined whether lexical tone is relevant during lexical selection. Trials containing exact homophone distractors (e.g. zhū vs. zhū) were named significantly more slowly than trials containing simple homophone distractors (e.g. zhū vs. zhú), suggesting that lexical tone plays a mediating role in lexical selection. Experiment 2, which employed pseudo-word transcriptions as distractors, examined the relative timing of lexical tone encoding. The findings indicated that: (1) lexical tone encoding occurs no later than syllable encoding and precedes the encoding of within-syllable segments; and (2) lexical tone encoding requires less processing time than syllable encoding.
Source: ExLing Conferences
Authors: Yuyu Zeng, Robert Fiorentino, Jie Zhang
Institutions: University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Kansas
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4327520868