ABSTRACT:In light of the high frequency of disyllabic words in modern Chinese and the "default" phonological status held by the disyllabic prosodic foot in speech production, we conducted a series of psycholinguistic experiments to determine whether the quantitative property of prosodic feet has a significant influence when parsing syntactically ambiguous utterances in speech perception. More specifically, without contextual or acoustic cues, would native Mandarin speakers be biased towards disyllabic structures when listening to six-syllable utterances that can be parsed into syntactically similar structures composed entirely of disyllabic or trisyllabic feet? Results indicate that, Mandarin speakers tend to parse ambiguous utterances initially into one of the two possible syntactic structures rather than simply recognizing them as ambiguous. Nonetheless, they do not favour disyllabic structures when lexical information regarding word meaning, syntactic function, usage frequency, etc. is available. However, when parsing sequences of six random digits where lexical and syntactic information is irrelevant, our results point to a clear preferential tendency towards disyllabic grouping. In other words, the quantitative property of prosodic feet plays a significant role in Mandarin speech parsing only when lexical and syntactic information is irrelevant or unavailable.

中文翻译：

---

普通话语音感知中的句法消歧及双音脚的语音状态研究

摘要：针对现代汉语中双音节词的高频率以及双音节韵脚在言语产生中的“默认”语音地位，我们进行了一系列心理语言学实验，以确定韵律脚的数量特性是否具有显着性。在语音感知中解析句法模糊的话语时的影响。更具体地说，如果没有上下文或声学线索，在听六音节话语时，母语为普通话的人会偏向双音节结构，这些话语可以解析成完全由双音节或三音节脚组成的句法相似结构吗？结果表明，说普通话的人最初倾向于将歧义的话语解析为两种可能的句法结构之一，而不是简单地将它们识别为歧义。尽管如此，当有关词义、句法功能、使用频率等的词汇信息可用时，它们不支持双音节结构。然而，当解析与词汇和句法信息无关的六个随机数字序列时，我们的结果表明明显倾向于双音节分组。换句话说，只有当词汇和句法信息不相关或不可用时，韵脚的数量特性才在普通话语音解析中发挥重要作用。然而，当解析与词汇和句法信息无关的六个随机数字序列时，我们的结果表明明显倾向于双音节分组。换句话说，只有当词汇和句法信息不相关或不可用时，韵脚的数量特性才在普通话语音解析中发挥重要作用。然而，当解析与词汇和句法信息无关的六个随机数字序列时，我们的结果表明明显倾向于双音节分组。换句话说，只有当词汇和句法信息不相关或不可用时，韵脚的数量特性才在普通话语音解析中发挥重要作用。