Huo, Yiling; (2025) Phonology in language prediction: the role of lexical tones and tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that comprehenders generate predictions about upcoming linguistic input during comprehension. However, questions remain regarding what types of cues can drive language predictions, what specific features are predicted by comprehenders, and how different levels of linguistic representations interact during prediction. This thesis examines the role of phonological information in lexical-level predictions during language comprehension, capitalising on Mandarin Chinese lexical tones and tone sandhi phenomena: specifically, the third-tone (T3) sandhi and the yi sandhi. On the input side of prediction, this thesis examines whether informative tone sandhi cues can drive lexical prediction in the visual world eye-tracking paradigm, and whether they modulate comprehenders' expectations about upcoming words in the sentence completion task. Results from sentence completion indicate that tone sandhi cues create weakly constraining contexts, increasing the probability of compatible words without completely inhibiting incompatible alternatives. Eye-tracking results suggest that the presence of informative tone sandhi cues can lead to earlier fixations on the target, although the effects are subtle. These findings suggest a small but non-negligible role of tone sandhi cues as an input to lexical predictions. On the output side of prediction, this thesis assesses whether comprehenders generate predictions about tonal forms of highly predictable words, as measured by their sensitivity to pre-target tone sandhi mismatches in the visual world paradigm. Eye movement patterns revealed that pre-target tone sandhi mismatches did not prompt shifts in visual attention away from the highly predictable objects or towards the unexpected target, suggesting that comprehenders may not routinely predict highly predictable words' tonal forms. Together, the findings suggest a small role for Mandarin Chinese lexical tones and tone sandhi in lexical-level predictions during comprehension. These findings indicate that information on the phonological level may not readily project onto the lexical level during prediction, and vice versa, carrying implications for theoretical models of prediction during language comprehension.

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