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Lexical Tone in Bilingual Crosstalk
Poster C59 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 4
Xin Wang1, Bob McMurray2; 1Macquarie University, 2University of Iowa
Spoken word recognition is characterized by competition, as the lexical processor needs not only to interpret the unfolding speech input, but also to inhibit the activation of non-target candidates (e.g., Luce & Pisoni, 1998). This competition has been extended to investigations in bilingualism to understand how bilingual listeners recognize spoken words in one language that sound similar to words in the other (e.g., Ju & Luce, 2004; Weber & Cutler, 2004). One linguistic dimension, lexical tones, has been shown to provide independent cues for lexical access within a tonal language (e.g., Malins & Joanisse, 2010). If tones are crucial in spoken word recognition, a key question is whether this linguistic knowledge is utilized in bilingual spoken word recognition. In other words, does lexical tone play a crucial role in cross-language lexical competition? To address this question, we used the Visual World Paradigm due to its temporally sensitive measures of lexical activation and competition (Tanenhaus, et al., 1995). These measures are collected by recording eye-movements when participants are instructed to click a target matching an auditory stimulus in an array of pictures on a computer screen. The experimental manipulation is realized through the presence of a competitor, the name of which bears a phonological relationship with the target. Here, through two experiments, we investigated whether lexical tones provided independent cues in cross-language lexical competition, compared to segments. In Experiment 1, we presented Mandarin-English participants with two types of target-competitor pairs: Segmental (“bay”--“cup”) where ‘cup’ in Mandarin Chinese is ‘/bei/1’ phonologically related to ‘bay’ (pronounced in statement intonation) only in segments, and Segment + Tone (“bay” – “quilt”) where ‘quilt’ in Mandarin Chinese is ‘/bei/4’ phonologically related to ‘bay’ (pronounced in statement intonation) in both segments and tones. The task was to click on the target (e.g., ‘bay’) when listening to ‘bay’ in English. The competition effect is measured by showing the difference between eye-fixations on competitors and unrelated distractors, indicating the lexical activation of the competitor relative to the target. In a within-participant design, we observed competition effect in the segment + tone condition, but not in the segmental condition. In addition, the competition effect was significantly larger in the segment + tone condition than the segmental condition. To replicate and consolidate these results, Experiment 2 was designed to reverse the effect of Segmental (seg) vs. Segmental + Tone (segtone) by presenting synthesized tokens whose tone matched the other competitor. In Exp 1, a target (e.g., bay) was recorded with a falling tone, resulting in a better match to /bei4/ (“quilt”, segtone) than /bei1/ (“cup”, seg). Here, we manipulated the pitch contours of the targets such that bay now had a high-level tone and so that /bei1/ was now the stronger competitor. This way, the seg vs. segtone condition in Exp 1 swapped with each other in Exp 2. We observed larger competition effects when both segment and tone cues were available in the stimuli. These results first demonstrate the obligatory role of lexical tones in cross-language lexical competition in VWP.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Speech Perception