Electrophysiological evidence for the integral nature of tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition

Ho, Amanda; Boshra, Rober; Schmidtke, Daniel; Oralova, Gaisha; Moro, Anna L.; Service, Elisabet; Connolly, John F.

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.05.031

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The auditory syllables elicited a greater N400 when their tone mismatched the expected syllable, compared to when they matched the expected syllable. Similar patterns have also been found for stimuli embedded in sentence contexts in Mandarin ( Ho et al, 2019 ; Li et al, 2008 ) and Cantonese ( Schirmer et al, 2005 ). 3…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 79%

N400 Evidence That the Early Stages of Lexical Access Ignore Knowledge About Phonological Alternations

Politzer-Ahles¹,

Lin

Pan

et al. 2021

Lang Speech

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Hearing a word that was already expected often facilitates comprehension, attenuating the amplitude of the N400 event-related brain potential component. On the other hand, hearing a word that was not expected elicits a larger N400. In the present study, we examined whether the N400 would be attenuated when a person hears something that is not exactly what they expected but is a viable alternative pronunciation of the morpheme they expected. This was done using Mandarin syllables, some of which can be pronounced with different lexical tones depending on the context. In two large-sample experiments (total n = 160) testing syllables in isolation and in phonologically viable contexts, we found little evidence that hearing an alternative pronunciation of the expected word attenuates the N400. These results suggest that comprehenders do not take advantage of their knowledge about systematic phonological alternations during the early stages of prediction or discrimination.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 79%

N400 Evidence That the Early Stages of Lexical Access Ignore Knowledge About Phonological Alternations

Politzer-Ahles¹,

Lin

Pan

et al. 2021

Lang Speech

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“…Compared with the consonant competitor, the match of an extra phoneme in the cohort condition led to a shallower declining slope and significantly more fixations, and a similar pattern can also be observed between consonant and rime competitor versus cohort competitor, indicating that lexical access takes place immediately with receipt of a minimal amount of acoustic information and the activation is updated incrementally with the competitors bearing more phonological similarity be activated to a larger extent. These results are in line with other recent findings (e.g., Ho et al, 2019) and the prediction of continuous mapping models (such as the TRACE model), which assume that as speech input unfolds over time, it is continuously mapped onto potential lexical representations which compete for recognition.…”

Section: The Incremental Processing Of Mandarin Monosyllabic Wordssupporting

confidence: 92%

“…The relative importance of onset and rime in Mandarin spoken word recognition still needs further investigation ( Zhao et al, 2011 ; Malins and Joanisse, 2012a ; Zou, 2017 ). Accounts on the nature of Mandarin word processing are also inconclusive, with some studies supporting an incremental fashion (e.g., Malins and Joanisse, 2012a ; Ho et al, 2019 ), while others suggesting a holistic way of processing and emphasizing the special status of syllables (e.g., Zhao et al, 2011 ; Gao et al, 2019 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The rhyme, tonal, and unrelated conditions all exhibited similar effects in PMN and N400, indicating that the whole-syllable mismatches do not merit any special status beyond and above individual sub-syllabic components. A recent study focused on spoken word processing in sentence context also suggested that Mandarin syllables are processed incrementally through phonological segments ( Ho et al, 2019 ). As indicated by the authors, online processing models (e.g., TRACE) are suitable to account for the incremental processing pattern of Mandarin monosyllabic words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Roles of Consonant, Rime, and Tone in Mandarin Spoken Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study

2022

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This study investigated the relative role of sub-syllabic components (initial consonant, rime, and tone) in spoken word recognition of Mandarin Chinese using an eye-tracking experiment with a visual world paradigm. Native Mandarin speakers (all born and grew up in Beijing) were presented with four pictures and an auditory stimulus. They were required to click the picture according to the sound stimulus they heard, and their eye movements were tracked during this process. For a target word (e.g., tang2 “candy”), nine conditions of competitors were constructed in terms of the amount of their phonological overlap with the target: consonant competitor (e.g., ti1 “ladder”), rime competitor (e.g., lang4 “wave”), tone competitor (e.g., niu2 “cow”), consonant plus rime competitor (e.g., tang1”soup”), consonant plus tone competitor (e.g., tou2 “head”), rime plus tone competitor (e.g., yang2 “sheep”), cohort competitor (e.g., ta3 “tower”), cohort plus tone competitor (e.g., tao2 “peach”), and baseline competitor (e.g., xue3 “snow”). A growth curve analysis was conducted with the fixation to competitors, targets, and distractors, and the results showed that (1) competitors with consonant or rime overlap can be adequately activated, while tone overlap plays a weaker role since additional tonal information can strengthen the competitive effect only when it was added to a candidate that already bears much phonological similarity with the target. (2) Mandarin words are processed in an incremental way in the time course of word recognition since different partially overlapping competitors could be activated immediately; (3) like the pattern found in English, both cohort and rime competitors were activated to compete for lexical activation, but these two competitors were not temporally distinctive and mainly differed in the size of their competitive effects. Generally, the gradation of activation based on the phonological similarity between target and candidates found in this study was in line with the continuous mapping models and may reflect a strategy of native speakers shaped by the informative characteristics of the interaction among different sub-syllabic components.

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“…In languages where tone has a lexical function, changing the tone on a target word changes its lexicosemantic content and thus turns it into a bad fit for the context. Such tone mismatches evoke N400 effects in native speakers (Brown‐Schmidt & Canseco‐Gonzalez, 2004; Ho et al, 2019; Malins & Joanisse, 2012; Pelzl et al, 2019; Zhao et al, 2011). In a language where tone has strong associations with following grammatical suffixes, like Swedish, an anterior negativity has been found for tone‐suffix mismatches when there is maximal focus on rule‐based processing and the grammatical content (Söderström et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native language experience shapes pre‐attentive foreign tone processing and guides rapid memory trace build‐up: An ERP study

et al. 2022

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Language experience, particularly from our native language (L1), shapes our perception of other languages around us. The present study examined how L1 experience moulds the initial processing of foreign (L2) tone during acquisition. In particular, we investigated whether learners were able to rapidly forge new neural memory traces for novel tonal words, which was tracked by recording learners’ ERP responses during two word acquisition sessions. We manipulated the degree of L1–L2 familiarity by comparing learners with a nontonal L1 (German) and a tonal L1 (Swedish) and by using tones that were similar (fall) or dissimilar (high, low, rise) to those occurring in Swedish. Our results indicate that a rapid, pre‐attentive memory trace build‐up for tone manifests in an early ERP component at ~50 ms but only at particularly high levels of L1–L2 similarity. Specifically, early processing was facilitated for an L2 tone that had a familiar pitch shape (fall) and word‐level function (inflection). This underlines the importance of these L1 properties for the early processing of L2 tone. In comparison, a later anterior negativity related to the processing of the tones’ grammatical content was unaffected by native language experience but was instead influenced by lexicality, pitch prominence, entrenchment, and successful learning. Behaviorally, learning effects emerged for all learners and tone types, regardless of L1–L2 familiarity or pitch prominence. Together, the findings suggest that while L1‐based facilitation effects occur, they mainly affect early processing stages and do not necessarily result in more successful L2 acquisition at behavioral level.

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Electrophysiological evidence for the integral nature of tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition

Cited by 11 publications

References 57 publications

N400 Evidence That the Early Stages of Lexical Access Ignore Knowledge About Phonological Alternations

N400 Evidence That the Early Stages of Lexical Access Ignore Knowledge About Phonological Alternations

The Roles of Consonant, Rime, and Tone in Mandarin Spoken Word Recognition: An Eye-Tracking Study

Native language experience shapes pre‐attentive foreign tone processing and guides rapid memory trace build‐up: An ERP study

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