Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones

This study provides neurocognitive evidence to shed further insight into the architecture of phonological representations. We tap into these representations by focusing on the neural processing of phonological alternations. Traditional generative accounts postulate abstract representations which are transformed by phonological processes into different alternants. Recent psycholinguistically-based frameworks posit that different alternants are listed in parallel in the abstract representation. Exemplar-based theories posit that alternation is a manifestation of frequency effects among concrete phonetic forms stored in memory. However, it is unclear the extent to which phonological representations of different levels of abstractedness are neurocognitive realities, beyond formal entities for linguistic analysis. This study tests the hypothesis that phonological representations are neurocognitive primitives that modulate speech processing and lexical access. We examined the processing of two surface-similar, but distributionally distinct lexical tone alternation patterns in Mandarin and Cantonese. With a cross-modal priming paradigm, differential neurophysiological components (LPC vs. N400) associated with the processing of alternation violations were identified cross-linguistically. Results support our hypothesis, suggesting that cross-linguistically distinct abstract phonological representations differentially modulate phonotactic detection, lexical access, and phonological restructuring processes. Results also lend theoretical insight into the multiform nature of the phonological representation, which encompasses both abstract and concrete levels of representations.

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Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones

Cited by 2 publications

References 50 publications

Auditory cortex and beyond: Deficits in congenital amusia

Auditory cortex and beyond: Deficits in congenital amusia

Neural processing of Mandarin and Cantonese lexical tone alternations: implications for the nature of phonological representations

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