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Updated: Jul 1, 2026

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Seeing pitch: visual information for lexical tones of Mandarin-Chinese
Trevor H Chen1, Dominic W Massaro
1University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA.
Abstract:
Mandarin perceivers were tested in visual lexical-tone identification before and after learning. Baseline performance was only slightly above chance, although there appeared to be some visual information in the speakers' neck and head movements. When participants were taught to use this visible information in two experiments, visual tone identification improved significantly. There appears to be a relationship between the production of lexical tones and the visible movements of the neck, head, and mouth, and this information can be effectively used after a short training session.
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