Beinan's Experience

The object of my fieldwork was to investigate the representation and recognition of Mandarin tone3-sandhi, a tonal dissimilation phenomenon where a tone changes its realisation depending on the context.

To do this, I ran several behavioural experiments at Tsing Hua University and Wangfu School in Beijing, China. In these experiments, I examined how stimuli with different lexical tones can affect the speed of target word recognition, thus providing insight into how words are represented in the brain.

Sometimes, fieldwork can be challenging and rather stressful! I can still remember the pressure of recruiting more than one hundred native speakers, the panic when the projector broke down, and the stress of commuting between two schools with a tight schedule. However, the interest and passion that students showed in the research topic helped make the whole process so enjoyable and rewarding.

This would not have been possible without the kind help of Dr. Jie Sui who provided the lab space for testing in Tsing Hua University, as well as Mr. Yi Wu for organising students at Wangfu School to take part.