The role of tonal information in speech prediction: evidence based on Chinese tone sandhi

Some studies assume that comprehenders predict word-form information (e.g. phonology) for the upcoming word, while the others argued that such an “all-aspects” prediction is not necessary. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment and an event-related potential (ERP) experiment to investigate phonological prediction effect in Mandarin comprehension. In Experiment 1, comprehenders utilise the tone of the number (e.g. “yi4one”) to predict the tone of the upcoming classifier and its corresponding object (e.g. “yi4 zhang1 you2piao4one ZHANG stamp”, means “a stamp”), leading to more fixation on the target object than the competitors (e.g. “yi2 liang4 dan1che1one LIANG bike”, means “a bike”) in the time window of the number. In Experiment 2, the mismatched tone induced a larger negative response than the matched tone (e.g. yi2 vs. yi4 for “a stamp”). These findings provide evidence for the tonal prediction effect, in which lexical tone can serve as a valuable cue for predicting upcoming words.