The involvement of tonal information during speech prediction: evidence based on Chinese tone sandhi

Some studies assume that comprehenders predict word-form information (e.g., phonology) for the upcoming word, while the others argued that such an ‘all-aspects’ prediction is not necessary. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment and an event-related potential (ERP) experiment to investigate phonological prediction effect in Mandarin comprehension. In Experiment 1, comprehenders utilize the tone of the number (e.g., 'yi4[one]') to predict the tone of the upcoming classifier and its corresponding object (e.g., 'yi4 zhang1 you2piao4[one ZHANG stamp]', means 'a stamp')), leading to more fixation on the target object than the competitors (e.g., 'yi2 liang4 dan1che1[one LIANG bike]', means 'a bike') in the time window of the number. In Experiment 2, the mismatched tone induced a larger negative response than the matched tone (e.g., [yi2] vs. [yi4] for 'a stamp'). These findings provide evidence for the tonal prediction effect, in which lexical tone can serve as a valuable cue for predicting upcoming words.