Tonal variability in lexical access

How do different types of tonal variability contribute to lexical access? We addressed this question by investigating a type of variability in Jinan tonal patterns, which is lexically non-contrastive but potentially contrastive in other words. This variability was tested against three levels of variability, namely, ‘acoustic identity’, ‘within-category variation’, and ‘lexically-contrastive variation’, in an auditory lexical decision task. The tonal pattern variation induced a similar but smaller facilitation effect compared with the acoustic identity and the within-category variation. In contrast, an inhibition effect was induced by the lexically contrastive condition. Additionally, we tested the participants’ tonal awareness. The effect of tonal awareness was smaller on the targets than on the primes. We conclude that, in lexical access, tonal patterns may have representative status but can converge in a lexically specific way, and that the contribution of tonal awareness is reduced when the form is repeated.