PROCESSING INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SEGMENTAL AND SUPRASEGMENTAL INFORMATION IN NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND MANDARINE CHINESE

The processing interactions between segmental and suprasegmental infor mation in native speakers of English and Mandarin Chinese were investi gated in a speeded classification task. Since in Chinese, unlike in En glish, tones convey lexically meaningful information, native speakers of these languages may process combinations of segmental and suprasegm ental information differently. Subjects heard consonant-vowel syllable s varying on a consonantal (segmental) dimension and either a Mandarin Chinese or constant-pitch (non-Mandarin) suprasegmental dimension. Th e English listeners showed mutual integrality with the Mandarin Chines e stimuli, but not the constant-pitch stimuli. The native Chinese list eners processed these dimensions with mutual integrality for both the Mandarin Chinese and the constant-pitch stimuli. These results were in terpreted in terms of the linguistic function and the structure of sup rasegmental information in Chinese and English. The results suggest th at the way listeners perceive speech depends on the interaction betwee n the structure of the signal and the processing strategies of the lis tener.