PhonDi Discussion Group

Marta Ortega discusses "How do Chinese-English speakers represent pitch in their bilingual lexicon?"

Abstract
There is consistent evidence that the two languages of a bilingual speaker interact. The question is to establish the extent and the details of this interaction. We address this question by exploring pitch in the lexicon of Chinese-English bilinguals. Pitch -- or rate of vocal fold vibration -- is the acoustic material used to express sentence-level meanings in English by means of sentence intonation and lexical meanings in Chinese by means of tones. This division of labor of pitch leads to the assumption that pitch is represented in the Chinese lexicon but not in the English lexicon. As a result, the question arises of how Chinese-English speakers represent pitch in their bilingual lexicons. Do these bilingual speakers represent pitch in English words like speakers of non-tonal languages do suggesting little interaction between their Chinese and English lexicons? Or on the contrary, do we find differences between the pitch representations of English words by Chinese-English speakers on the one hand and by non-tonal speakers on the other? If so, what is the nature of these differences and what kind of interaction between the Chinese and English lexicons do these differences suggest? Behavioral experiments and one recent ERP experiment addressing these questions will be presented.