Title: Effects of anticipatory tonal variations on spoken-word recognition and lexical activation
Abstract: The acoustics of speech sounds can vary dramatically depending on phonetic context, yet listeners can reliably process spoken language in a rapid and seemingly effortless manner. Previous research suggests that acoustic variations in speech can actually facilitate, rather than disrupt, the processing of spoken language, and sometimes listeners can even use fine-grained acoustic cues in the unfolding speech signal to predict the sound(s) of an upcoming word. The present study investigates effects of two types of anticipatory tonal variations in Mandarin – third tone sandhi (3TS) and anticipatory tonal coarticulation (ATC) – on spoken word recognition and lexical activation. While 3TS is a phonological tonal alternation rule in Mandarin, ATC is a fine-grained phonetic variation phenomenon. Using the visual-world paradigm, two eye tracking experiments were run to investigate whether 3TS and ATC cues, respectively, can influence the time course of listeners’ lexical activation and spoken-word recognition. Eye fixation proportion and saccade latency data were analyzed. Results show that 3TS, but not ATC, can facilitate spoken-word recognition and influence lexical activation.
