Ting Zou ^* Xinbing Luo

• Beijing Foreign Studies University, Haidian District, China

This study investigates whether unfamiliar tone sandhi patterns in Tianjin Mandarin can be implicitly learned through an artificial language learning experiment, and if the acquired knowledge is rule-based and generalizable. Participants were trained to learn monosyllabic words and disyllabic phrases with their attention focused on a wordorder rule, while unknowingly being exposed to unfamiliar tone sandhi patterns. A judgment test with trial-to-trial confidence ratings was conducted to assess the learning outcomes and participants' awareness. Results revealed significantly abovechance performance on tone sandhi patterns for learned phrases. This learning effect was generalized to unseen phrases made up of familiar words, but not to phrases with new words, indicating a degree of abstraction across instances, though the learning is not fully rule-based. The confidence rating results suggest that participants were unaware of the structural sandhi knowledge, but the reaction time data of the judgment test indicate that the sandhi knowledge was learned with awareness at the level of noticing.