Acceptance of tonal and segmental variability correlates to inventory size in Mandarin Chinese

Lexical access in spoken language recognition is commonly seen as activating multiple lexical candidates based on phonetic similarity as the speech signal unfolds. How different types of phonemes contribute to lexical access has been a question for quite some time. In Mandarin Chinese, a language with lexical tone, research has been sparse on the different levels of lexical contribution of tones and segments.The present study uses a novel binary lexical selection task to test whether or not tones are more lexically binding than three categories of segments: onsets, vowels, and codas. Our results showed that tones are more susceptible to change compared to onsets and vowels, but more stable when compared to codas. These results are in line with the respective size of these categories in the Chinese phoneme inventory. Thus, we believe that tones are not processed in a qualitatively different way from segments, but that all categories are subject to the same restraints.