Experimental investigation of Mandarin lexical tone production

Abstract

Using two picture-naming experiments, this study investigated the role of lexical tone in Mandarin spoken word production. In both experiments, the target words were monosyllabic, and naming latency served as the dependent variable. Experiment 1, which used pictures as distractors, examined whether lexical tone is relevant during lexical selection. Trials containing exact homophone distractors (e.g. zhū vs. zhū) were named significantly more slowly than trials containing simple homophone distractors (e.g. zhū vs. zhú), suggesting that lexical tone plays a mediating role in lexical selection. Experiment 2, which employed pseudo-word transcriptions as distractors, examined the relative timing of lexical tone encoding. The findings indicated that: (1) lexical tone encoding occurs no later than syllable encoding and precedes the encoding of within-syllable segments; and (2) lexical tone encoding requires less processing time than syllable encoding.