Thank you for your interest in my poster! I will be available during 12:00-2:00 to talk with you about this study through Zoom meeting. Please use this link (https://us04web.zoom.us/j/161439892) to access a Zoom meeting (Meeting ID: 161 439 892) with us! Otherwise, you are welcome to contact me at weilai.phonetics@gmail.com.
[Abstract]
We investigate whether listeners integrate the co-variation between
Mandarin 3rd-tone sandhi and prosodic hierarchy to facilitate syntactic
parsing and utterance comprehension. 27 structurally ambiguous sentences
were constructed, each containing two consecutive T3 syllables intervened
by a word boundary. Different interpretations are derived depending on
whether the T3-surrounded boundary is taken as a major or minor syntactic
juncture. The boundary-preceding syllable in each sentence was manipulated
into 3 tonal (*low*/*low-rising/high-rising*) conditions by 2 temporal (
*natural/shortened*) conditions. Semantic identification results showed
more major-juncture interpretation reported in *low-tone *and
*temporally-natural *conditions, and more minor-juncture
interpretations in *rising-tone
*and *temporally-shortened *conditions. We further showed an interaction
between sentence length and the influence of tone variation.