Lee Chao-Yang
School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, Grover Center, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, USA.
Lang Speech. 2007;50(Pt 1):101-23. doi: 10.1177/00238309070500010501.
Lexical tone languages make up the majority of all known languages of the world, but the role of tone in lexical processing remains unclear. In the present study, four form priming experiments examined the role of Mandarin tones in constraining lexical activation and the time course of the activation. When a prime and a target were related directly in form (e.g., lou3 'hug'--lou2 'hall'), competitors that differed from the prime in tone failed to be activated, indicating the use of tonal information to distinguish between segmentally identical words. When a prime and a target were not form-related but were related through a third word that was not actually presented (e.g., lou3 'hug'--jian4zhu0 'building', where lou3 is form-related to lou2 'hall', which was semantically related to jian4zhu0), a mismatch in tone prevented activation of minimal tone pairs at 250ms interstimulus interval (ISI) but did not prevent activation at 50 ms ISI. These results indicate that tonal information is used on-line to reduce the number of activated candidates, but does not prevent the minimal tone pairs from being activated in the early phase of lexical activation.
声调语言占世界上所有已知语言的大多数，但声调在词汇加工中的作用仍不明确。在本研究中，四个形式启动实验考察了汉语声调在限制词汇激活及激活的时间进程方面的作用。当启动词和目标词在形式上直接相关时（例如，“搂（lou3）”——“楼（lou2）”），声调与启动词不同的竞争词未能被激活，这表明利用声调信息来区分语音相同的词。当启动词和目标词在形式上不相关，但通过一个实际未呈现的第三个词相关时（例如，“搂（lou3）”——“建筑（jian4zhu0）”，其中“搂（lou3）”与“楼（lou2）”在形式上相关，而“楼（lou2）”与“建筑（jian4zhu0）”在语义上相关），在刺激间隔（ISI）为250毫秒时，声调不匹配会阻止最小声调对的激活，但在ISI为50毫秒时不会阻止激活。这些结果表明，声调信息在在线过程中用于减少被激活的候选词数量，但不会阻止最小声调对在词汇激活的早期阶段被激活。
