The prosodic information of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi helps disambiguate between N-N compound and N-N coordination structure-A visual world paradigm study

摘要

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.