Exploring concurrent activation in Mandarin tone planning: A perceptuomotor compatibility study

The planning status of tones remains unresolved in speech-production studies. This study examines Mandarin tone planning using a cue-distractor paradigm to investigate whether tones can be concurrently activated and competitively planned, a mechanism previously demonstrated mainly for segments. Participants were asked to produce target syllables with different tones, while hearing a distractor syllable with a different tone or a different vowel. We found that participants responded later when the target and distractor differed in tones, revealing an effect of tone perception on tone production (i.e., perceptuomotor effect). Crucially, the equivalence testing showed that the distraction elicited by tone and vowel distractors was statistically equivalent. In addition, responses were slower as the acoustic similarity between tone targets and distractors decreased. The present study therefore provides new evidence for the active role of tone in planning and extends concurrent activation from segments to tones. OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT: The trial-level data, analysis files, and auditory stimuli associated with this study are freely available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RGP5T . The experiments reported in this article were not preregistered.