The prediction of segmental and tonal information in Mandarin Chinese: An eye-tracking investigation

There is controversy about the extent to which people predict phonology during comprehension. In three visual-world experiments, we ask whether it occurs in Mandarin, a tonal language. Participants heard sentences containing a target word that was highly predictable (Cloze 80.2%, Experiment 1) or very highly predictable (Cloze 93.9%, Experiments 2-3) and saw an array of objects containing one whose name matched the target word (Experiments 1-2), was unrelated to the target word (Experiments 1-3), or matched the target word in segment and tone (Experiments 1- 3), in segment only (Experiments 1-3), or tone only (Experiment 3). In comparison to the unrelated object, participants looked at the segment+tone object more (Experiments 1-3), and sometimes looked at the segment object more (Experiments 1 and 3), but there was no evidence that they looked at the tone object more. We conclude that participants predict segmental information, and that they do so independently of tone.