Perception and representation of Mandarin fricatives

Abstract

This study investigates the psychological reality of the complementary distributed palatal fricatives [?, ??, ?] and dental fricatives [ts, ts?, s] in Mandarin Chinese. An initial experiment following up on research showing a priming effect between allophonic variants but not between contrastive sounds, was conducted to see the extent to which the dental fricative [s] primes a palatal fricative [?], or vice versa. The results from semantic priming and lexical decision tasks suggest possible representations of the palatal fricative [?] and the dental fricative [s].