Abstract
The phonological status of prevocalic glides in Chinese has been a controversial issue for a long time. Conventionally, the prevocalic glide is regarded as part of the rhyme (Cheng 1973; Lin 1989) in contrast to the recent studies viewing the on-glide as a secondary articulation feature of the preceding consonant (Duanmu 1990, 2000, 2001), or an independent segment of the onset cluster (Bao 1990). Alternatively, the prevocalic glide is considered ‘indeterminate’ relying on the place of articulation of initial consonant (Wan 1997, 1999, 2001). It appears that the prevocalic glide in Chinese has not been clearly identified judged by these contradictory points of view.In the current study, three experiments were conducted to examine whether the prevocalic glide forms a sub-syllabic unit with the rime or the onset. First, in the priming experiment, participants named primes and targets that shared the same onsets (e.g. pjaw55-pje55) or shared the same rime (e.g. pjaw55-tjaw55). Second, in the two syllable-contraction experiments replicating Chang (2000), participants were asked to blend two syllables into one by intuition (e.g. kwan21 tsHaj21a kaj21/ kwaj21).As a result, the statement that the prevocalic glide belongs to the onset was not supported no matter in the priming experiment or in the syllable-contraction experiments. Even though there were some confounding factors leading the priming experiment not to make any solid claim, our findings of the syllable-contraction experiments were still in agreement with the traditional analyses. The outcome showed a preference for the “rime” answers irrespective of the place of articulation of initial consonant or the type of prevocalic glide. In addition, we also found that some factors such as the glide preservation strategy, the frequency effect and the recency effect had influences on the outputs, changing the phonological status of prevocalic glides from rhyme to onset.