What is in the neighborhood of a tonal syllable? Evidence from auditory lexical decision in Mandarin Chinese

Phonological neighborhood effects have been found in spoken word recognition, word production and phonetic variation (Gahl, Yao, & Johnson, 2012; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Vitevitch, 2002). Overall, words from dense neighborhoods are harder to recognize but easier to produce. However, most previous studies have focused on English, while evidence suggests that these effects may not generalize cross-linguistically due to language-specific configurations of the lexicon (Michael S Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006, 2009). In the current study, we investigate the effects of phonological neighborhoods in Mandarin Chinese, which has a vastly different lexicon structure from that of English. Results from an auditory lexical decision experiment showed that phonological neighborhood density and neighbor frequency (defined by the one-phoneme/tone difference rule) are predictive of the speed and accuracy of lexical decision. Homophone density also has a facilitative effect on the accuracy of lexical decision. The implications of the current findings are discussed in the framework of the lexicon model proposed by Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (1994, 2009).