2.4 M ANDARIN M ENTAL L EXICON AND W ORD A SSOCIATION
2.4.2 Mandarin Word Association
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Table 2-4-1. Main types of speech errors identified in Wan’s corpus9
Error type Semantic Phonological
Semantic errors + -
Phonological errors - +
Mixed-type errors + +
Environmental errors - -
Since semantic activation spreads to the target lemma that can have either phonological or semantic correlates, errors should not be marked just by binary system as a semantic or phonological error because both semantics and phonology can have an effect on the occurrence of speech errors (e.g., Wan and Tang, manuscript). Therefore, the connection between lexicon could be classify as either a semantic [+sem, -phon] (e.g., [ming2cheng1]/[shu4zi4] ‘name/number’) or phonological [-sem, +phon] (e.g., ([lou2ti1]/
‘OT’ ‘stairs/optimality theory’) relationship, or both [+sem, +phon] (e.g., [tong3ji4]/[zong3ji4] ‘statistics/ sum’) or neither [-sem, -phon], which generally relates to context-induced relationship.
2.4.2 Mandarin Word Association
Words have been supposed to be the core linguistic units for the investigation of languages, with the particular properties of Mandarin lexicon we discussed above, a number of studies are related to lexical organization in Mandarin by using word association tasks in Beijing Mandarin (e.g., Da & Lee, 2000; Zhao, 2013; Zhang & Chen, 2018) and
9 The speech errors investigated in Tang and Wan (2019) were obtained from a corpus with over 8,000 errors produced by over 100 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin collected by Wan in a naturalistic setting (see Wan, 2007, and Tang & Wan, 2019, for more information).
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in Taiwan Mandarin (e.g., Chen, Chen & Dell, 2002; Huang et al., 2009; Lee & Lee, 2011;
Hu et al., 2017).
Language differences between two dialects of Mandarin have occurred in Beijing Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. For example, with Beijing Mandarin as the target language, Da and Lee (2000) tried to investigate the Mandarin mental lexicon by a continuous free association task on a single concept of ‘law’. One hundred participants (67 males; 33 females) were requested to write down twenty associated words to each prompt word. Eight-hundred high-frequency associated responses were classified into ten categories by the researchers as the possible network of the concept ‘law’ without considering the semantic relations.
On the other hand, most previous works providing information about Mandarin lexicon have been psychologically researched on bilingual speakers. For instance, Zhao (2013) compared the Mandarin lexicon among (a) native Mandarin speakers, (b) Western Mandarin learners, and (c) Mandarin learners. The results of this single free association task in nouns, verbs, and adjectives revealed that group (b) tended to response nouns to all types of stimuli, whereas group (a) and (c) showed the similar tendency to provide responses with the matching lexical categories. However, imageability and syllable types were not balanced in this study. Therefore, Zhang and Chen (2018) considered lexical category, word frequency as well as syllable types for a single free association task in twenty disyllabic nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They found that the associate connection between semantics is stronger than form-based, and the paradigmatic relation is stronger than syntagmatic-based.
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At the same time, several studies were implemented on the basis of the remote association test by Mednick (1962) to create the Taiwan Mandarin assessment of creativity with high reliability and validity (e.g., Huang, Chen & Liu, 2012; Lee, 2014; Chang, Wu, Chen, & Wu, 2016). For example, in Huang, Chen and Liu’s experiment (2012), participants received three stimulate words at once, and they were required to respond a words associated to all the stimuli. With this method, the individual variabilities of creativity can be evaluated by different associate processes in a psychological viewpoint.
Chen, Chen and Dell (2002) showed how phonology should be taken into consideration in Mandarin when it comes to lexical access and organization. Word-form encoding of disyllabic words in Mandarin was investigated in their experiments with the factors such as syllable, tone, and lexicography taken into account. The results showed that syllable with tone, but not with lexicography, was a unit in word production, while syllable without tone could also function as an independent unit at the phonological level.
In an emotionality ratings and free word association experiment, Lee and Lee (2011) found a higher level of concreteness rating in the negative words than the positive and neutral words, and higher familiarity in the positive words than the other two types of words within 267 common Mandarin words. The mean of arousal level ratings, familiarity, concreteness, and associative number and strength were included in the material design, but no other linguistic relations were analyzed in this study. Therefore, in another free word association task, Hu, Chen, Zhuo, Chen, Chang, and Sung (2017) also conducted the experiment in Taiwan Mandarin disyllabic words with the frequency and the value of the mental imagery considered in order to establish a Mandarin association norm covering 1,200 stimulated words. The result reveals that low frequency or high abstraction words
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were associated more concentrate than high frequency or low abstraction words, which also indicates that low frequency or high abstraction words yielded more consistent and convergent associative responses.
Although studies found in English have proved that phonology (e.g., syllable structures, tones, and phonemes) can be a major factor influencing the mental lexicon, it is not certain how phonology is stored in Mandarin lexicon. Therefore, the present study intends to investigate the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin by conducting disyllabic word association tasks in nouns and verbs with the consideration of the distribution of the onset consonants, tone structure, syllable type, syllable structure, and imageability.
Research and the experiment for the target purpose with the key influences including frequency, imageability, syntactic category, and phonological encoding in Mandarin have so far not been found yet. Most related studies were lack of the phonological factors such as possible onsets, syllable structure, syllable types as well as the syntactic factors (e.g., Da & Lee, 2000; Lee & Lee, 2011; Huang, Chen & Liu, 2012; Chang et al, 2016; Hu et al, 2017), or some potential problems may still exist in spite of some research taking most factors into accounts. For example, although orthography, syllable types, and tones were involved in the priming tasks by Chen, Chen and Dell (2002) to investigate the word form encoding of disyllabic words in Mandarin, the factors were only arranged into the first syllable of the target words. Also, only four syllable tokens ([fei], [ke], [xi], and [qing]) were selected for the first syllables, and the syllable structures in terms of the onset, nucleus, and coda were also absent in this study. Regarding the tendency of the Mandarin disyllabification, a discussion on both syllable structures and syntactic category with
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experiment implemented by Chen and Li (2011) applied thirty Mandarin monosyllabic words as the targets to explore the process of word form encoding. The results suggested that naming and typing in Mandarin probably involve different word form encoding processes, i.e., syllable driven in naming, but segment driven in typing. Since the syntactic category with imageability may be difficult to define on the monosyllabic words in Mandarin, the onsets, orthorgraphy, and frequency were taken into account for the targets.
Nevertheless, the onsets involving in the thirty target words were not provided which may affect the responses considering that some Mandarin onsets have relatively strict phonotactic constraints to the nucleus (e.g., onsets like [tɕ, tɕʰ, ɕ] only accept high front vowels [i] and [y], but the same vowels are not allowed to follow the onsets such as [x, ts, tsʰ, s,]). Moreover, when typing a response with coda may also an influential variance in this case which was not discussed.
2.5 Research Questions and Hypothesis
With the related research about Mandarin lexicon in literature, a semantic or phonological tendency seemingly has not been proven clearly among the studies because the possible factors affecting these two encodings during the lexical access should be the fundamental premise of experiment design for the comparison between semantics and phonology in Mandarin lexicon; however, they have been taken into account only partially or insufficiently. In the present study, the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin is therefore intended to be explored by free disyllabic word association tasks in nouns and verbs. Both nouns and verbs are the main syntactic categories with the highest frequency used in Mandarin (Huang et al., 1995; Chan, 2016), and the evidence from lexical errors by Wan and Ting (2019) as well as Tang and Wan (2019) both confirmed the finding. The
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target words are selected based on the frequency and the syntactic categories encoded in Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus 3.0 (Sinica Corpus) by Huang et al. (1995)10. At the same time, the selected disyllabic words from Sinica Corpus are counterbalanced with all possible Taiwan Mandarin onset consonants, tone structure, and syllable structure according to the Duanmu’s CVX theory (1990, 2000). Finally, the target words’
imageability are referred from Extended-HowNet and marked as concrete or abstract words11. The target words will be randomized and presented by Mandarin Phonetic Symbols for the word association task to dismiss the Mandarin lexicographical effect, and access the interaction among linguistic features in Mandarin lexicon in the present study.
Question 1 What is the tendency of lexical organization between phonological and semantic networks in Taiwan Mandarin lexicon?
(1a) A semantic tendency of lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin lexicon is hypothesized due to the core lexical semantic information embedded in Mandarin characters according to Huang and Hsieh (2015) and Hsieh (2006, 2016).
10 Though the Academic Sinica Balanced Corpus 3.0 (Sinica Corpus) cannot represent the exactly current language phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin, it contains five million words with a user-friendly search interface (http://elearning.ling.sinica.edu.tw/CWordfreq_index.html), and it is also the first fully POS-tagged balanced Chinese Corpus including 46 different tags. Therefore, the Sinica Corpus 3.0 is eligible to be applied in the present study.
11 The criteria of the definition of a word’s imageability as an abstraction or concreteness were referred to the hierarchical category of the word in Extended-HowNet, and determined by the
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Question 2 How do linguistic features put influences on the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin?
(2a) Frequency effect is considered for the experimental stimuli in the present study; the effect could also hold the networks between responses and stimuli of the free word association regarding the priming effect.
(2b) Lexical categories are hypothesized to affect the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin as the preference of shared parts-of-speech.
(2c) A paradigmatic relation within the semantic relations is hypothesized as the tendency to present in the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin regarding the findings of previous research.
(2d) Rhyme is hypothesized to affect Mandarin lexicon more than initialness regarding a different graphic depth of its lexical level against the Indo-European languages. Other phonological relations including syllable and tone structures between stimuli and responses of associations are expected to present less effect than the semantic ones.
Question 3 How do the considered linguistic influences in the present study interact to each other in the Taiwan Mandarin lexicon?
(3a) The linguistic features considered in the present study are hypothesized to affect the Taiwan Mandarin lexicon as well as interact to each other.
Regarding the previous works on the Mandarin lexicon and word associations (e.g., Zhao, 2013; Huang & Hsieh, 2015; Hsieh, 2006, 2016; Zhang & Chen, 2018; Tang & Wan,
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2019), semantic encoding is expected to show stronger connections than phonology in the Mandarin lexical organization. According to Tang & Wan (2019)’s findings, the shared parts-of-speech relation are presented between targets and speech errors; therefore, the lexical categories are also assumed to show a similar relation between stimuli and responses during free word associations. The paradigmatic relation may domain between the responses to noun targets; however, the semantic relation between the verb targets and the responses may be syntagmatic. Still, the paradigmatic relation is predicted to present more than syntagmatic one regarding the lexical priming of the present study with the previous evidence (e.g., Zhao, 2013; Zhang & Chen, 2018; Wan & Ting, 2019). Moreover, a high proportion of semantic relation, i.e., [+sem, -phon] relation, are supposed to present concerning the research methodology by word association tasks in the present study.
However, since the limited studies in Mandarin lexicon with sufficient influences considered have been proposed, few evidence can support the possible answers to other hypothesized questions such as how the phonological encoding (i.e., onset, tones, or syllable structure) are related to the Mandarin lexical access and organization. Also, it is hard to conclude the processing stages of lexical access between semantic and phonological relation in Mandarin lexicon due to the different syllable structure with tone function, and strong lexical semantic encoding in Mandarin characters. Therefore, the possible methodology of defining the classification of the phonological relation will be discussed in the following chapters.
A review of numerous models that focus on the structure of semantic representation and speech production planning in the mental lexicon has been provided in the chapter two
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the interaction between considered linguistic influences in the present study on lexical organization will try to be outlined and demonstrated as the [±sem, ±phon, ±POS, ±C]
relation. Therefore, concerning the influences of word access and organization, the research gaps in Taiwan Mandarin lexicon by free word associations is provided to be solved. To further illustrate the methodology, the experimental designs of the present study will be explained in the next chapter.
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CHAPTER THREE. METHODOLOGY
The methodology of the present study to explore the lexical organization in Taiwan Mandarin by disyllabic word association tasks in nouns and verbs will be introduced in this chapter12. First, the issues concerned with data collection and data elicitation will be explained in the section 3.1. The information of the participants will be covered in the section 3.1.1. The information of experimental materials will be shown in the section 3.1.2.
The experimental procedures will be presented in the section 3.1.3. The experimental instruments used will be described in the section 3.1.4. Before the experimental results demonstrated in the next chapter, the approaches to data analysis with the selection of the statistic method for the data analyses will be included in the section 3.2. The statistical analyses in the present study are computed by R (R Core Team, 2018), a programming language in a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics (please refer to Appendix IV for the programming codes in R).