Syntactic Tone and Discourse Processing in Beijing Mandarin: A Case Study
北京话发展中的句调处理
Liang Tao 陶亮

Abstract 摘要
Three experiments tested the role of an emerging syntactic tone in spoken word recognition of Beijing Mandarin Chinese. The study examined the role of the new syntactic tone in lexical access and how synchronic change is perceived in the task of word recognition. Experiment 1 used an information-deprived condition where information for the standard interpretation of the word was provided prior to the crucial tone, but the syntactic tone based interpretation was not provided. Experiment 2 used a prosody-reduced condition where the prosodic cues were unclear while information for both standard and syntactic tone based interpretation was provided. Experiment 3 involved a story retell task to further assess tone comprehension. The results show that the emerging syntactic tone had an impact on participant’s lexical interpretations, although the impact was more obvious when prosody information was clearly provided. The results also confirmed participants’ tone comprehension through story retells. The results support the hypotheses that a) there is a new syntactic tone in spoken Beijing Mandarin whose function goes beyond lexical tone, which has become a precursor for word recognition in discourse processing; and, b) language processing reflects asymmetry in that speakers prefer the traditional grammatical interpretation more than the interpretation derived from the newly developed syntactic tone when prosodic information is unclear. The study demonstrates how usage-based grammatical changes affect speaker’s mental model of lexical access.

本文通过三个实验测试了北京话里出现的句法声调(句调)及其在词汇识别中的作用。测试一使用了词汇信息不完全的短文。测试二提供了全部词汇信息，但语音信息不清晰。测试三提供了全部词汇信息和清晰的语音环境，但受试者回答问题之后要重复所听到的短文。九十八位北京人参与了测试。测试结果表明，北京口语中出现的句调不同于单词的词调，其功能不在于分辨该调所在词的词义，而是话语中句调之后的词义。句调的出现及其功能展示了语法在话语使用中的发展及其对说话者认知语法模式的影响。

Keywords 关键词

Syntactic change 句型发展变化 Syntactic tone 句调 Lexical tone 词调 Spoken Beijing Mandarin 北京话 Psycholinguistics 心理语言学 Language processes 词处理

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