Presentation 2017-07-23
The prosodic information of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi helps disambiguate between N-N compound and N-N coordination structure
Tzu-Yin Chen, Yuki Hirose, Takane Ito,
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Abstract(in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Abstract(in English) Mandarin Chinese Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) is a phenomenon where a tone 3 syllable (T3) changes to tone 2 when followed by another T3. It is conceivable that the occurrence of T3S serves as a cue for listeners to increase the possibility that the syllable in question will be followed by another T3 syllable within a certain domain where the rule T3S applies. However, some previous studies claim that the domain of application of T3S is not necessarily morpho-syntactically determined, analyzing T3S as a phonologically conditioned process of tonal change. Furthermore, it has been reported that T3S is not obligatorily applied in a sequence of T3 syllables so that non-application of T3S is unlikely to provide much information on the upcoming tone or structure. We conducted a visual world paradigm experiment where participants looked at a visual display consisting of monster characters representing N-N compound interpretation and those representing N-N coordination interpretation (where the two nouns are in separate domains for T3S). Four auditory stimuli types of N-N sequence were used: T3S + T3, T3 + T3 (where T3S is not applied), T3 + non-T3 (T3S is not conditioned), and non-T3 + T3. The results are: (i) T3S + T3 condition promoted N-N compound interpretation while (ii) both of the two initial T3 conditions where T3S didn’t occur (T3+ T3 and T3 + non-T3) promoted the N-N coordination reading. Further comparison between the two initial T3 conditions has revealed that (iii) T3 + T3 facilitated N-N coordination reading more strongly than T3 + non-T3, where the former, but not the latter, constitutes a T3S environment. These results suggest that the non-application of T3S facilitates the presence of a word boundary while the application of T3S is linked to the absence of a word boundary, and listeners use both of the information of whether T3S applied to the first noun or not and the lexical tone of the second noun to disambiguate between N-N compound and N-N coordination structure.
Keyword(in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Keyword(in English) Mandarin ChineseTone 3 Sandhivisual world paradigmeye movementprosodic cuelexical processing
Paper # TL2017-37
Date of Issue 2017-07-15 (TL)

Conference Information
Committee TL
Conference Date 2017/7/22(2days)
Place (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Place (in English) NINJAL
Topics (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Topics (in English) Human Language Processing and Learning
Chair Masami Suzuki(KDDI Research)
Vice Chair Tadahisa Kondo(Kogakuin Univ.) / Chiaki Kubomura(Yamano College of Aesthetics)
Secretary Tadahisa Kondo(Kobe Gakuin Univ.) / Chiaki Kubomura(Kyoto Univ.)
Assistant Nobuyuki Jincho(Waseda Univ.) / Noriaki Takada(Ferris Univ.)

Paper Information
Registration To Technical Committee on Thought and Language
Language ENG
Title (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Sub Title (in Japanese) (See Japanese page)
Title (in English) The prosodic information of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi helps disambiguate between N-N compound and N-N coordination structure
Sub Title (in English) A visual world paradigm study
Keyword(1) Mandarin ChineseTone 3 Sandhivisual world paradigmeye movementprosodic cuelexical processing
1st Author's Name Tzu-Yin Chen
1st Author's Affiliation The University of Tokyo(Univ. of Tokyo)
2nd Author's Name Yuki Hirose
2nd Author's Affiliation The University of Tokyo(Univ. of Tokyo)
3rd Author's Name Takane Ito
3rd Author's Affiliation The University of Tokyo(Univ. of Tokyo)
Date 2017-07-23
Paper # TL2017-37
Volume (vol) vol.117
Number (no) TL-149
Page pp.pp.121-126(TL),
#Pages 6
Date of Issue 2017-07-15 (TL)