spoken word recognition in contexts

Native speakers of a tonal language (like Chinese) use relative pitch height and contour to differentiate the meaning of words. The role of tone information in real-time language processing still remains unclear, despite the fact that many languages have lexical tones. In particular, there is ongoing debate about how lexical tones compare to vowels and consonants in accessing to different lexical representations. Moreover, this question is currently explored more clearly in single-word priming studies, but not in contexts where words are accessed as part of a sentence even though in daily speech communication, tones and vowels are more commonly embedded in a semantic context.

This study investigates the role of semantic predictability in tonal and vowel processing by examining how contextual constraints influence lexical access. Specifically, we address two sets of key questions:

Predictive Processing and Phonological Competition:

• Can activation of a spoken target be observed before the target word is heard?
• Does phonological competition occur in this pretarget time window?
• How does the strength of prior context modulate these effects?

Anticipation of Tone and Rime Information:

• Do listeners anticipate tone or rime information of an upcoming target word before its acoustic signal becomes available?
• If so, which type of information exerts a stronger influence?
• Does the strength of prior context modulate phonological competition?

By addressing these questions, this study aims to provide new insights into the interaction between contextual effects and phonological processing of tonal and segmental information in spoken language comprehension.