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Sandhi-tone words prolong fixation duration during silent sentence reading in Chinese

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Abstract

The current study examined whether or not lexical access is influenced by detailed phonological features during the silent reading of Chinese sentences. We used two types of two-character target words (Mandarin sandhi-tone and base-tone). The first characters of the words in the sandhi-tone condition had a tonal alternation, but no tonal alternation was involved in the base-tone condition. Recordings of eye movements revealed that native Mandarin Chinese readers viewed the base-tone target words more briefly than the sandhi-tone target words when they were infrequent. Such articulation-specific effects on visual word processing, however, diminished for frequent words. We suggest that a conflict in tonal representation at a character/morpheme level and at a word level induces prolongation in fixation duration on infrequent sandhi-tone words, and conclude that these tonal effects appear to reflect articulation simulation of words during the silent reading of Chinese sentences.

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Notes

  1. There is considerable debate on whether lexical tone is phonemic or not. Lexical tone is supra-segmental and many would also argue that it is phonemic, in the sense that a change in lexical tone modifies the lexical meaning in a systematic way. For better reconciliation with previous studies, we chose to use the term phonemic (or sub-phonemic) in the present study.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Yingyi Luo for her helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was supported by Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. EdUHK ECS 28606818) and by Start-up Research Grant of University of Macau (SRG2019-00148-FSS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Jinger Pan

  2. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies and Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Caicai Zhang & Xunan Huang

  3. Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau SAR, China

    Ming Yan

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  1. Jinger Pan
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Correspondence to Ming Yan.

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Table 3 Linear mixed model estimates for durations
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Pan, J., Zhang, C., Huang, X. et al. Sandhi-tone words prolong fixation duration during silent sentence reading in Chinese. Read Writ 34, 841–857 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10093-7

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