The role of Mandarin lexical tones in lexical access under different contextual conditions

The current study pursues Ye & Connine's (1999 Ye, Y. and Connine, C. M. 1999. Processing spoken Chinese: The role of tone information. Language and Cognitive Processes, 14(5/6): 609–630. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggestion that tonal information is much more important when words are presented in context, than in isolation. Disyllabic Mandarin words were either presented normally, or with changes in their segmental and/or tonal structure. Critically, these items were presented in isolation, in sentence context, and in idioms; previous studies have not examined these issues in sentential context. In Experiment 1, native Mandarin speakers made lexical decisions about these items. In Experiment 2, the critical stimuli were presented in white noise, and the listeners’ task was to detect the vowels and the tones of the stimuli. The results supported a more important role for tonal cues when the stimulus is presented in context than when it is in isolation; this pattern depended on the task conditions, as suggested by Soto-Faraco et al. (2001 Soto-Faraco, S., Sebastian-Galles, N. and Cutler, A. 2001. Segmental and suprasegmental mismatch in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language, 45: 412–432. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Mattys et al. (2005 Mattys, S. L., White, L. and Melhorn, J. F. 2005. Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134: 477–500. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).