The Homophone Effect in Mandarin Word Recognition
Wei Zhou · The Knowledge Bank (The Ohio State University) · 2015
In this study, we investigated the role of homophone density in monosyllabic word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. The experiment followed the design of Wiener and Ito (in press). We employed eye-tracking device and recorded click responses to help us understand lexical processing. Three factors were controlled in this experiment: homophone density, syllable frequency, and tonal probability of words. In Wiener and Ito,with uncontrolled homophone density, high tonal probability showed effect only in low frequency syllables, but not in high frequency syllables. In current study, what we found is that high homophone density showed the trend of slowing down recognition and affected the informativeness of tone regardless of syllable frequency.