The role of coarticulatory tonal information in Cantonese spoken word recognition: an eye-tracking study

Abstract Previous eye-tracking studies suggest listeners closely track coarticulatory segmental information to facilitate spoken word recognition. In tonal languages such as Cantonese, the F0 value of high-level and rising tones is higher when preceding a low tone than preceding a high tone. Given the tonal coarticulation effect in Cantonese, this study used a printed-word version of the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to investigate Macau Cantonese listeners’ real-time processing of coarticulatory information through two types of word pairings, in which target words and competitor words are either matched or mismatched in coarticulatory pattern (i.e., preceding a low or high tone). The results of the growth curve analysis on the difference between target and competitor fixations show that a fixation advantage of target words increases more quickly over time in the mismatch condition than in the match condition. The overall findings suggest that native listeners closely attend to the coarticulatory tonal information to facilitate lexical activation during moment-by-moment processing. Since the mechanisms of the coarticulatory effect may differ between segments and lexical tones, this research calls for further eye-tracking studies that manipulate coarticulation cues in segmental and suprasegmental domains.