Lexical tone in spoken word recognition: A view from Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese, segmentally identical words are distinguished by lexical tones, which are realized as distinct fundamental frequency patterns over a syllable. Since tone is used phonemically in this language, the question arises of whether tone is implicated in lexical processes in the same way as segmental structure. Three experiments evaluated the role of Mandarin tones in lexical activation and competition. The form and mediated priming experiments showed that Mandarin listeners exploited lexical tone on‐line to disambiguate monosyllabic words that were segmentally identical but tonally distinct. Furthermore, acoustic similarity between tones modulated the magnitude of priming and generated opposite priming patterns between the two priming experiments. The interplay of lexical activation and inhibition, based on a neural network model of lexical access, was invoked to account for the dissociation. The gating experiment showed that more acoustic input was needed to recognize words with tonal minima...