Predicting phonology in language comprehension: Evidence from the visual world eye-tracking task in Mandarin Chinese

Whereas a growing body of research demonstrates that people may predict conceptual representations during language comprehension, evidence for phonological prediction is less straightforward. Moreover, existing findings of phonological prediction come largely from studies conducted with languages with alphabetic scripts, making it difficult to dissociate the effects of phonology from orthography. In two experiments, we used the visual world paradigm to investigate whether comprehenders predict phonological information during comprehension of Chinese sentences, where phonology and orthography are largely dissociable. Participants listened to sentences containing a highly predictable word while viewing a visual display consisting of a critical object and three distractors (target object, a semantic competitor object, a phonological competitor object, or an unrelated object). We manipulated preview time (i.e., 2 s in Experiment 1 and 1 s in Experiment 2) to investigate how preview time influences the phonological prediction effect. In addition, we used different stimuli to test the robustness of the results. Results showed anticipatory eye movements for semantic competitors: participants fixated more on the semantic competitors than unrelated objects before the onset of predictable target words. Critically, in the two experiments, the results showed anticipatory fixations on phonological competitor objects. These findings provide clear evidence for the preactivation of both semantic and phonological information in sentence comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).