Abstract: Constraints of lexical tones on semantic activation on the recognition of spoken words in Chinese was investigated in three cross-modal priming lexical decision experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, disyllabic compound words that shared the same segmental templates but differed in lexical tones (e.g., tiao4 yue4, jump vs. tiao2 yue1, treaty; numbers denote tone types) were used as auditory primes while words that were semantically related to one of the pairs were visually presented for lexical decision. The semantic primes and the tone-mismatch primes differed in the tones of the first, the second, or both syllables. In Experiment 3, nonword tone-mismatch primes were created by changing the first or the second tones of semantic primes. The similarity between the original tones and the resulting tones was also manipulated. It was found that the appearance of significant priming effects for the tone-mismatch primes depended on lexical competition environment, the goodness of fit between input tones and underlying tones, and the constituent position of mismatching tones. The results are discussed in terms of how tonal information in speech input is mapped onto the lexicon, how tonal information is represented in the lexicon, and how tonal constraints on semantic activation are influenced by competition environment.

Key words: spoken word recognition, semantic activation, lexical tone, cross-modal priming