中  華  心  理  學  刊
民92，45卷，1期，107-120

Jenn-Yeu Chen（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University ）；Wei-Chun Lin（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University ）；Ludovic Ferrand（CNRS and Department of Psychology, Université René Descartes）

Abstract

The syllable’s role in Chinese (Mandarin) speech production was investigated using masked syllable priming combined with a word naming task. In three experiments, the prime (shown in the form of a Chinese character but masked) shared the first few segments with the beginning of the disyllabic target word. The segmental overlap either corresponded to a syllable or it did not. Aside from a neutral prime, there were two types of related primes: a CV (e.g., ba3) or a CVG (e.g., bay3) syllable, and two types of targets: a CV-GV (e.g., ba4-ye4) or a CVG-CVX (e.g., bay4-ley4) word, where numbers stand for tones. In Experiment 1, when the prime-target overlap corresponded to a syllable, the tones and the orthographies were also the same (i.e., the overlap in effect corresponded to the entire character). In Experiment 2, the syllable overlap included the tone but not the orthography. In Experiment 3, the syllable overlap was restricted to the syllable only, the tone and the orthography being different. A crossover interaction of the prime by target type was observed not only in Exp. 1 but also in Exp. 2 and Exp. 3, the effect being larger in Exp. 1 and about the same in Exps. 2 and 3. The crossover interaction effects from the last two experiments support the view that the syllable (lacking the tone) is a stored phonological chunk and plays an independent role as a planning unit in Chinese word production.

Keywords：Speech production, Chinese, syllable