Who Do You Love, Your Mother or Your Horse? An Event-Related Brain Potential Analysis of Tone Processing in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were obtained from 25 Mandarin speakers while they listened to normal and anomalous sentences containing one of three types of semantic anomalies created by manipulating the tone, the syllable, or both tone and syllable (double-anomaly) of sentence-final words. We hypothesized N400 effects elicited by all three types of anomalies and the largest by the double-anomaly. As expected, all three elicited N400 effects starting approximately 150 ms poststimulus and continuing until 1000 ms in some areas. Surprisingly, onset of the double-anomaly effect was approximately 50 ms later than the rest. Delayed detection of errors in this condition may be responsible for the apparent delay. Slight differences between syllable and tone conditions may be due to the relative timing of these acoustic cues.

Developmental differences in the influence of phonological similarity on spoken word processing in Mandarin Chinese

“…We would therefore argue that both children and adults were able to efficiently use tonal information to constrain word recognition as soon as it became available. This conclusion is further motivated by previous work, including our own, highlighting the pivotal role of tone in Mandarin spoken word recognition (Brown-Schmidt & Canseco-Gonzalez, 2004; Malins & Joanisse, 2010; Zhao et al, 2011; Malins & Joanisse, 2012). The current study adds to the existing literature by suggesting that tonal processing systems are sufficiently developed in ten-year old children such that they resolve tonal competition over a similar time course as adults.…”

Music-to-language transfer effect: may melodic ability improve learning of tonal languages by native nontonal speakers?

“…Evidences of the linguistic nature of lexical tone processing have been also found by Brown-Schmidt and Canseco-Gonzalez (2004): they showed that N400, the event-related potential component typically elicited by unexpected linguistic stimuli, is also present in Mandarin speakers when the semantic alteration is determined by the lexical tone.…”

“…Previous studies suggest that lexical tones are processed as linguistic information and not as a pure tonal information (Brown-Schmidt and Canseco-Gonzalez 2004;Klein et al 2001;Van Lancker and Fromkin 1973;Wang et al 1999). The problem of the double linguistic-tonal nature of lexical tones has been extensively faced taking into account the brain lateralization of cognitive functions.…”

Neural specializations for speech and pitch: moving beyond the dichotomies

“…In a study of the role of tone and segmental information in Cantonese word processing (Schirmer et al 2005), the time course and amplitude of the N400 effect, a negativity that is associated with processing the semantic meaning of a word, were comparable for tone and segmental violations (cf. Brown-Schmidt & Canseco-Gonzalez 2004). The MMN, a cortical potential elicited by an odd-ball paradigm, reflects preattentive processing of auditory stimuli.…”