Direct cueing of word identity through word duration: evidence from Mandarin homophones
Authors: Xiaomeng Zhu, Megan Niu, Jason Shaw, Kevin Tang
Organizations: Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, USA · Department of English Language and Linguistics, Institute of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 40225, Germany · Also at: Department of Linguistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, 32611-5454, United States of America
While there is increasing evidence that words are stored in the mental lexicon with some phonetic detail, there are open questions about exactly which phonetic details are stored and whether they are functionally relevant for spoken word recognition. Word-level phonetic cues, such as word duration, provide an appropriate test case. Across languages, including Mandarin Chinese, high frequency words are shorter than low frequency words. Using a homophone ordering task, we investigate whether differences in word duration impact word recognition. Mandarin Chinese was examined since it has abundant disyllabic homophones. Our results indicate that participants were able to use word duration to recognize the order of homophone pairs, selected to vary in lexical frequency. Both with high noise levels and when no other cues were available, participants mapped the shorter duration auditory stimulus to the higher frequency word. The results provide evidence that word duration can directly cue the identity of words, suggesting that it may be a phonetic detail incorporated into the lexical representation. We discuss this direct cueing account alongside alternative accounts of how word duration may modulate word recognition.
Figures & tables
Account
(i) Context integration
(ii) Spectral integration
(iii) Direct cueing
Prediction
At chance
At chance
Above chance
Table 1: Predictions of the three accounts for our experiments testing homophone identification based on word duration.
Figure 1: Experimental interface in Gorilla showing an example test item (homophone pairs). The instruction at the top says “Which order of words did you hear?”. The left button has a homophone pair of low-high order (frequency), and the right button shows the reverse order.
Parameter
Log-Odds
SE
95% CI
z
p
Intercept
0.11
0.04
[0.03,0.19]
2.81
0.005
Auditory Stimuli [Short–Long]
0.24
0.08
[0.08,0.39]
3.01
0.003
Trial z
0.01
0.04
[−0.07,0.09]
0.26
0.793
Table 2: Results of the logistic mixed-effects regression model predicting homophone-order choice as a function of auditory stimulus type and standardized trial order in Experiment 1.
Parameter
Log-Odds
SE
95% CI
z
p
Intercept
0.01
0.05
[−0.08,0.10]
0.25
0.804
Auditory Stimuli [Short–Long]
0.20
0.08
[0.05,0.35]
2.60
0.009
Trial z
0.00946
0.04
[−0.07,0.08]
0.25
0.805
Table 3: Results of the logistic mixed-effects regression model predicting homophone-order choice as a function of auditory stimulus type and standardized trial order in Experiment 2.
Table 4: Results of the logistic mixed-effects regression model predicting homophone-order choice from auditory stimulus type, experiment, their interaction, and standardized trial order. Categorical predictors were coded using −0.5 and +0.5 contrasts.