Tone sequences in lexical processing of Beijing Mandarin

Neurophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Mandarin Lexical Tone Processing

Language experience enhances discrimination of speech contrasts at a behavioral- perceptual level, as well as at a pre-attentive level, as indexed by event-related potential (ERP) mismatch negativity (MMN) responses. The enhanced sensitivity could be the result of changes in acoustic resolution and/or long-term memory representations of the relevant information in the auditory cortex. To examin...

Mandarin Lexical Tone Recognition: The Gating Paradigm

Research on spoken word recognition in Indo-European languages often does not incorporate prosody. In Mandarin Chinese, however, lexical prosody is used extensively and has been shown to affect word processing in previous studies. The present study uses the gating paradigm to investigate the processing of the four Mandarin tones as well as the role of the initial segment in processing. Duration...

Acoustic analysis of lexical tone in Mandarin infant-directed speech.

Using Mandarin Chinese, a "tone language" in which the pitch contours of syllables differentiate words, the authors examined the acoustic modifications of infant-directed speech (IDS) at the syllable level to test 2 hypotheses: (a) the overall increase in pitch and intonation contour that occurs in IDS at the phrase level would not distort lexical pitch at the syllable level and (b) IDS provide...

L2 Acquisition and Processing of Mandarin Tone

Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing.

In three experiments, the processing of lexical tone in Cantonese was examined. Cantonese listeners more often accepted a nonword as a word when the only difference between the nonword and the word was in tone, especially when the F0 onset difference between correct and erroneous tone was small. Same-different judgments by these listeners were also slower and less accurate when the only differe...