TY  - JOUR
A1  - Luo, Yingyi
A1  - Yan, Ming
A1  - Yan, Shaorong
A1  - Zhou, Xiaolin
A1  - Inhoff, Albrecht W.
T1  - Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings
JF  - The science of the total environment : an international journal for scientific research into the environment and its relationship with man
N2  - In two experiments, we examined the contribution of articulation-specific features to visual word recognition during the reading of Chinese. In spoken Standard Chinese, a syllable with a full tone can be tone-neutralized through sound weakening and pitch contour change, and there are two types of two-character compound words with respect to their articulation variation. One type requires articulation of a full tone for each constituent character, and the other requires a full- and a neutral-tone articulation for the first and second characters, respectively. Words of these two types with identical first characters were selected and embedded in sentences. Native speakers of Standard Chinese were recruited to read the sentences. In Experiment 1, the individual words of a sentence were presented serially at a fixed pace while event-related potentials were recorded. This resulted in less-negative N100 and anterior N250 amplitudes and in more-negative N400 amplitudes when targets contained a neutral tone. Complete sentences were visible in Experiment 2, and eye movements were recorded while participants read. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed shorter viewing durations and fewer refixations on-and fewer regressive saccades to-target words when their second syllable was articulated with a neutral rather than a full tone. Together, the results indicate that readers represent articulation-specific word properties, that these representations are routinely activated early during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, and that the representations are also used during later stages of word processing.
KW  - Lexical tone
KW  - Neutral tone
KW  - Articulation duration
KW  - Syllabic tone
KW  - Sentence reading
KW  - Chinese
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-015-0368-1
SN  - 1530-7026
SN  - 1531-135X
VL  - 16
SP  - 72
EP  - 92
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  -