| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 心理學所 === 95 === In a form preparation task, the target words in a block either share the word-initial elements (e.g., the syllable) or do not. Production latencies tend to be shorter when something is shared than when nothing is shared. This has been known as the form preparation effect. Roelofs & Meyer (1998) found that the form preparation effect was contingent upon the target words also sharing the same prosodic frame (specifically, the same number of syllables and the same stress pattern). In the present study, we made an analogy of the tonal pattern of a Chinese word with the stress pattern of an English word. In Experiment 1, the target words shared the first tonal syllable, while the tonal patterns of the words were manipulated to be identical or different. In Experiments 2 and 3, the target words shared the first tonal syllable, while the numbers of syllables of the words were manipulated to be identical or different. The results showed that the syllable preparation effects were unaffected by the manipulations, suggesting that the tonal pattern nor the number of syllables constitutes the content of the prosodic frame of a Chinese word. Experiment 4 manipulated the length (number of segments) of the first tonal syllable that was shared among the target words. The syllable preparation effect was larger when the syllable was longer, indicating that the segment rather than the syllable was the basic production unit in Chinese. This contradicted Chen, Chen, & Dell’s (2002) earlier claim. The remaining experiments looked into the role of the syllable further. Experiment 5 contrasted the form preparation effect of the first tonal syllable with that of the first tonal syllable plus the onset of the second syllable. Experiments 6 and 7 examined if adding the second segmental syllable would increase the first tonal syllable preparation effect. The results showed that additional sharing of part or entirety of the second syllable did not increase the preparation effect of the first tonal syllable. The syllable in Chinese probably acts to define the domain of phonological planning, rather than as a stored phonological unit. A modified Chinese word-form encoding model was proposed to account for the existing data.
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