Objective In connected speech, spoken words may vary considerably from their forms in isolation. Much of the variation is regular. There have been heated debates on whether and how speakers store regular variants in their long-term memory, and how they process them in speech production and comprehension. Most psycholinguistic work, however, focuses on how listeners cope with segmental variation. I propose instead to examine how speakers store and process regular pitch variation. My empirical focus is on Chinese dialects, where pitch changes (tones) are used to distinguish word meanings in isolation, but tonal realization of words in phrases is determined by domain formation and pitch changes within the domain, together known as tone sandhi. Crucially, both how a tonal domain is formed and how sandhi variants are realized within the domain are influenced by a complex mixture of pragmatic, syntactic, and phonological factors. The pitch variation in these dialects thus manifests at all levels of linguistic organization. I hypothesize that the way pitch variation is stored in the mental lexicon and processed during speech production varies according to the types of tone sandhi changes and the constituent structures of sandhi domains. I take an interdisciplinary approach to test this hypothesis. Cross-dialect speech corpora will be compiled to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how pitch variation is conditioned in linguistic contexts. Acoustic and perceptual experiments will be conducted to understand the categorical vs. gradient nature of pitch variation. Both voice onset latencies and speakers’ eye movements during speech will be monitored to tap into the representation as well as the processing of pitch variation. Results of this project will contribute to debates on representation and processing of regular linguistic variation in general, therefore furthering our understanding of human cognition. Fields of science humanitieslanguages and literaturelinguistics Keywords Chinese dialects phonetics prosody speech planning tonal representation tone sandhi Programme(s) FP7-IDEAS-ERC - Specific programme: "Ideas" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013) Topic(s) ERC-SG-SH3 - ERC Starting Grant - Environment and society Call for proposal ERC-2007-StG See other projects for this call Funding Scheme ERC-SG - ERC Starting Grant Host institution UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN EU contribution € 600 000,00 Address RAPENBURG 70 2311 EZ Leiden Netherlands See on map Region West-Nederland Zuid-Holland Agglomeratie Leiden en Bollenstreek Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Gea Hakker (Ms.) Principal investigator Yiya Chen (Dr.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data Beneficiaries (1) Sort alphabetically Sort by EU Contribution Expand all Collapse all UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN Netherlands EU contribution € 600 000,00 Address RAPENBURG 70 2311 EZ Leiden See on map Region West-Nederland Zuid-Holland Agglomeratie Leiden en Bollenstreek Activity type Higher or Secondary Education Establishments Administrative Contact Gea Hakker (Ms.) Principal investigator Yiya Chen (Dr.) Links Contact the organisation Opens in new window Website Opens in new window Total cost No data
