Representation of “T3 sandhi” in mandarin: significance of context

T3 sandhi in Mandarin is a phonological alternation where two adjacent T3-T3 tones are not allowed and become T[2]-T3. Although this phenomenon has been extensively studied in previous work, concerns about how T3 sandhi is represented in the mental lexicon remain controversial. We approached the issue of representation in a series of cross-modal priming experiments, including two semantic priming experiments with and without context. Our results indicated that T2 failed to prime a target beginning with T3 in a non-sandhi context. However, both T2 and T3 were able to induce semantic activation when appropriate contextual information was present. Conversely, when such information was absent, only T3 activated the lexical entry. Thus, our study suggests that T3 is specified, as expected for dissimilation, and T2 is resolved by a re-writing rule only under appropriate contextual information.