The Role of Tone Similarities in Thai-Mandarin Bilingual Lexical Access
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Abstract
Tone is a crucial factor in lexical access for tonal language speakers and for tonal bilinguals, even when processing a non-tonal language (Lee, 2007; Malins & Joanisse, 2010; Shook & Marian, 2016; Shuai & Malins, 2017; Wang et al., 2020). This study investigated how high-proficiency Thai learners of Mandarin perceived and categorized L2 Mandarin tones and whether tone similarities affected their lexical access. In Experiment 1, 30 Thai learners of Mandarin listened to 200 Mandarin-Thai pairs of segmentally overlapped monosyllabic words with different tones, e.g., /pi-pì:/, and rated the similarity of the items using a 7-point Likert scale. The results showed that participants’ ratings were likely based on acoustic similarities of tone contour. In Experiment 2, the same group of participants participated in an auditory lexical decision task with phonological priming to investigate the role of interlingual homophones (IHs) with similar tones in bilingual lexical access. The results revealed that reaction times (RTs) of IHs with similar tone contours were significantly faster than those of IHs with different tone contours and non-IHs, demonstrating facilitation effects. The facilitation effect corresponds to previous studies (Duyck, 2005, among others), indicating that lexicons of both languages may be phonologically integrated (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). Also, the RTs of IHs with different tone contours were not significantly different from those of non-IHs. Overall, this study highlights the prominent role of F0 properties for bi-tonal speakers, as tone contour similarities can induce a facilitatory phonological priming effect.
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References
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