Interlingual two-to-one mapping of tonal categories

• JUNRU WU ^[1] ; YIYA CHEN ^[2] ; VINCENT J. VAN HEUVEN ^[2] ; NIELS O. SCHILLER ^[2]
  1. [1] East China Normal University

     East China Normal University

     China

     
  2. [2] Leiden University

     Leiden University

     Países Bajos

     
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 20, Nº 4, 2017, págs. 813-833
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Both Standard Chinese (SC) high- and low-rising tones sound like the rising tone in Jinan Mandarin (JM) Chinese. Acoustically (Experiment 1), the JM rising tone overlaps with both SC rising tones, but more with the high-rising tone than with the low-rising tone. Perceptually (Experiment 2), the JM rising tone was more likely identified as the SC high-rising tone by SC monolinguals. Experiment 3 examined the role of this two-to-one interlingual tonal mapping in bilingual lexical access. Final high-rising SC pseudo-words were more frequently and more quickly accepted as JM real words than final low-rising SC pseudo-words were. However, both high- and low-rising SC pseudo-words triggered equivalent facilitatory semantic priming on JM real-word targets. The results suggest that different tones are represented in the bilinguals’ mental lexicon in terms of fine-grained and sometimes overlapping acoustic specifications. Lexical activation and semantic activation are partially independent.