Wei Lai
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania

Tone variation in lexical and structural disambiguation

I present two studies on the perception and processing of tone variation in word identification and sentence parsing.

The first study investigates audio-visual integration of talker gender to uncover intended tonal target in Cantonese tone perception, and shows that listeners are more likely to hear a high tone in a male voice than in a female voice for stimuli with equivalent pitch. Furthermore, we find that the influence of gender voice can be absent in pitch perception in a non-linguistic task and become present in a linguistic task, providing evidence for the existence of different processing stages.

The second study investigates whether listeners integrate the co-variation between Mandarin 3rd-tone sandhi (T3->T2/_T3) and prosodic hierarchy to facilitate syntactic parsing and utterance comprehension. Structurally ambiguous sentences are constructed, each containing two consecutive T3 syllables intervened by a word boundary. Different interpretations are derived depending on whether the T3-surrounded boundary is taken as a major or minor syntactic juncture. The result showed more minor-juncture interpretations when tone sandhi applies; moreover, the minor-juncture report rate varies with the slope of the tone sandhi variant.

We discuss the implications on the involvement of phonetic information in linguistic representations.