Abstract
This paper aims to re-examine the issues of psychological reality of the Taiwanese Tone Circle with a novel experimental setting. Previous results from various wug tests all suggested that the tone sandhi rules should be unproductive, due to the obtained poor correct response rates (in general below 20%~30%; [3, 4, 6, 8]). But it is important to note that these results are confounded with the factor that not a single rating experiment has ever been conducted for those nonce words so it is reasonable to question whether the participants were really assimilated to those nonce words when in experiments (or, the “foreignness” quandary). This is because no linguistic computation would be possible if the speakers fail to come up with a proper lexical representation. To avoid this problem, we used real words to study this issue by means of “homophone resolver expression” and our results showed that the correct response rates can be as high as 75%, suggesting that Taiwanese tone sandhi rules may not be necessarily unproductive as is widely assumed.