A Comparative Study Of The Implicit Priming Effect Of Tones Between Mandarin And Cantonese

Tone plays an important role in learning and using mandarin and Cantonese.At present,there are few studies on the implicit priming effect of tones in academic circles.Therefore,this study uses experimental methods to study the implicit priming effects of different tonal languages,including four experiments: mandarin true-word experiment,mandarin false-word experiment,Cantonese true-word experiment and Cantonese false-word experiment,exploring whether there is implicit priming effect in mandarin tones and Cantonese tones,which provides some empirical support for the linear or non-linear theory of tones.This study recruited 50(18-30 years old)mandarin experimental subjects,20 males and 30 females,who were required to be proficient in using mandarin without obvious dialectal accent.Forty Cantonese(18-30 years old)subjects,9 males and 31 females,were asked to speak Cantonese from an early age in Guangzhou or Hong Kong.The odd-man-out method was used in the experiment.The corpus consisted of true words,false words and fillers.In the mandarin experiment,according to the the characteristics of mandarin tone,the corpus is divided into five groups,including Before homogeneous group,After homogenous group,Completely homogeneous,Heterogeneous group and Unrelated group.In the Cantonese experiment,according to the characteristics of Cantonese tone,the corpus is divided into four groups,including Before homogeneous group,After homogenous group,Completely homogeneous and Unrelated group.The experimental results are mainly based on the statistical analysis of the reaction accuracy and reaction time,so as to draw a conclusion.The results show that:(1)The practice accuracy,test accuracy and test efficiency of mandarin true-word experiment were all above 94%.The order of mean reaction time was Completely homogeneous group < Unrelated group < After homogeneous group < Before homogeneous group < Heterogeneous group.The Repeated Measurement ANOVA results showed that the main effect of type was significant,and there was a significant difference between Completely homogeneous group and Heterogeneous group,but no significant difference was found between the Unrelated group and the other four groups,so the acoustic similarity of the tone was not found to trigger the implicit priming effect.(2)The practice accuracy,test accuracy and test efficiency of the mandarin false-word experiment were all above 95%.The order of mean reaction time was Complete homogeneous group < Before homogeneous group < After homogeneous group < Heterogeneous group < Unrelated group.The Repeated Measurement ANOVA results showed that the main effect of type was significant,and there were significant differences between Unrelated group and Before homogeneous group,and between Unrelated group and Completely homogeneous group.At the same time,Unrelated group had the longest reaction time,which proved that the acoustic similarity of the tonality did trigger the implicit priming effect.(3)The practice accuracy,test accuracy and test efficiency of Cantonese true-word experiment were all above 95%.The order of mean reaction time was as follows: Unrelated group < Complete homogeneous group < After homogeneous group < Before homogeneous group.The Repeated Measurement ANOVA results showed that the main effect of type was significant,and there were significant differences between Unrelated group and Before homogeneous group,and between Completely homogeneous group and Before homogeneous group.However,the reaction time of Unrelated group was the shortest,so it was not found that the acoustic similarity of the tone caused the implicit priming effect.(4)The practice accuracy,test accuracy and test efficiency of Cantonese false-word experiment were all above 94%.The order of mean reaction time was as follows: Unrelated group < Complete homogeneous group < Before homogeneous group < After homogeneous group.The Repeated Measurement ANOVA results showed that the main effect of type was not significant.We haven't found that the acoustic similarity caused the implicit priming effect.(5)Comparing the mandarin true-word experiment with the mandarin false-word experiment,we can see that the three indicators of the correct response rate are not very different.There are some similarities in the order of reaction time.After the exclusion of Unrelated group,Completely homogeneous group was the shortest and Heterogeneous group was the longest.After homogeneous group of the true-word experiment was shorter than Before homogeneous group,and Before homogeneous group of the false-word experiment was shorter than After homogeneous group.Mandarin false-word experiment proves that mandarin tone has implicit priming effect,which also provides some empirical support for the theory that mandarin tone belongs to non-linear.[(6)Comparing the Cantonese true-word experiment and Cantonese false-word experiment.We can see that the three indicators of the correct response rate are not very different.There are some similarities in the order of reaction time.After the exclusion of Unrelated group,Completely homogeneous group was the shortest.The After homogeneous group of the true-word experiment was shorter than Before homogeneous group,and Before homogeneous group of the false-word experiment was shorter than After homogeneous group.The true-word and false-word experiments in Cantonese have not found that Cantonese tone has an implicit priming effect,which fail to provide empirical support for the non-linear theory of Cantonese tone.(7)Comparing the mandarin experiment with the Cantonese experiment,we can see that mandarin tone has implicit priming effect,and Cantonese tone has no implicit priming effect.Therefore,it is not found that the implicit priming effect of tones has universal value for different tone languages.In this paper,we found that the tone of Mandarin has implicit priming effect by examining the reaction accuracy and the reaction time.It wasn't found that the Cantonese tone has implicit priming effect.A comparative study of mandarin and Cantonese has not found that the implicit priming effect of tones has universal value for different tone languages.At the same time,the mandarin false-word experiment provides some empirical support for the non-linear theory of tone.