The current study pursues Ye & Connine's (1999) suggestion that tonal information is much more important when words are presented in context, than in isolation. Disyllabic Mandarin words were either presented normally, or with changes in their segmental and/or tonal structure. Critically, these items were presented in isolation, in sentence context, and in idioms; previous studies have not examined these issues in sentential context. In Experiment 1, native Mandarin speakers made lexical decisions about these items. In Experiment 2, the critical stimuli were presented in white noise, and the l...
