Mental Representation of Kunming Chinese Tone Sandhi: Episodic or Abstract?

This poster investigated the mental representation of tone sandhi words (words that undergo tonal alternation) in Kunming Chinese. Auditory-auditory priming lexical decision task was conducted to examine whether the surface forms or the underlying forms of the sandhi words were stored in the mental lexicon and accessed during spoken word recognition. Results showed that the surface forms of T1 and T3 sandhi words were stored episodically in the mental lexicon. Although tone 1 sandhi and tone 3 sandhi rules differ in opacity, they were stored similarly, casting doubts on the role of opacity in determining the representation of sandhi patterns.