Is Chinese Tone 3 Sandhi a Sufficient Prosodic Cue to Lexical Processing? - A Visual-World Paradigm Study

摘要

Two visual-world paradigm experiments examined whether Chinese Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S: a tone 3 syllable changes to tone 2 when followed by another tone 3 syllable) on a noun facilitates the prediction on morphological structure (whether it is a single head noun or a first constituent of a compound). Under careful control of vowel length and loudness in auditory stimuli, participants preferentially looked at the compound visual targets when hearing stimuli with T3S applied, while the single visual targets had higher probability of gaze when the stimuli contained a T3 syllable without T3S application. The results suggest that the application of T3S is an effective cue to facilitates the processing of the compound analysis, while the T3 word without T3S leads to the anticipation of the single structure.