Tu Jung-Yueh, Chien Yu-Fu
PhD/MA Program in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 7;12:756921. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.756921. eCollection 2021.
This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 (T3) and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical tone aid lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language.
本研究调查了对双音节词中普通话声调交替的感知。在普通话中，当一个低降的第三声后面跟着另一个第三声时，会转变为高升的第二声，这被称为连读变调。尽管先前的研究表明，高升的连读变调第三声（T3）和第二声在基频上存在统计学上的显著差异，但以普通话为母语的听众在感知任务中未能正确区分这两个声调。本研究利用眼动追踪中的视觉世界范式，进一步考察词汇声调中的声学细节是否有助于普通话的词汇通达。结果表明，说普通话的听众倾向于将第二声当作第二声来处理，而对于连读变调第三声，他们倾向于先将其同时当作第三声和第二声来处理，随后再察觉连读变调语境所揭示的这两个声调之间的声学差异，最终在词汇通达过程中激活目标词。眼动追踪结果表明，基频的细微声学细节可能会以自动的方式促进声调语言中的词汇通达。
