Early cortical processing of linguistic pitch patterns as revealed by the mismatch negativity

Online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin: Evidence from ERPs

“…These results are highly consistent with the MMN studies examining the online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin at the pre-attentive stage. In those two studies (Ren et al, 2009(Ren et al, , 2013, listeners are able to perceive the difference between question and statement intonation when the intonation associates with a Tone4 (reflected in an MMN effect), but they cannot make a distinction between question and statement intonation when the intonation associates with a Tone2 (reflected in no MMN). The MMN studies used one-syllable sentences, while our study extended the length of the utterances from one syllable to five syllables.…”

“…In the above MMN studies (Ren et al, 2009(Ren et al, , 2013 and many other P300 studies, a target and a non-target are preset in the design. Very often participants just respond to the target stimuli.…”

“…Only two studies examined the online processing of both tone and intonation in Mandarin, to our knowledge. Ren et al, (2009) constructed an oddball sequence. A word with lexical Tone4 (i.e., /gai4/ 1 ), uttered with statement intonation was presented as the standard stimulus, and /gai4/ with question intonation was presented as the deviant stimulus to native Mandarin listeners.…”

“…Specifically, the question that arises here is whether native Mandarin listeners can disentangle intonation information from tone information over a broader sentence domain. Second, the extant ERP studies (Ren et al, 2009(Ren et al, , 2013 investigated tone and intonation processing at the pre-attentive stage where the attention of the participants was directed to elsewhere. In this kind of design, there is no way to measure the behavioral effects of the deviant acoustic stimulus in the stream, making it impossible to distinguish between automatic neural responses arising from acoustic variability and responses related to "attention capture" (Fritz et al, 2007).…”

Processing of Acoustic and Phonological Information of Lexical Tones in Mandarin Chinese Revealed by Mismatch Negativity

“…Gandour et al (2000) further distinguished between the pure acoustic features vs. acoustic features plus semantic features in the perception of tones such as lexical tones in Chinese and Thai. An alternative view to the above is that there is no fundamental difference between the two in terms of cognitive processing: the pitch contrasts in tones are spectral variations, and the processing of these contrasts always involves the same type of acoustic analysis regardless of its specific features (e.g., Zatorre and Belin, 2001;Warrier and Zatorre, 2004;Ren et al, 2009). This alternative view suggests that the fundamental features of the acoustic information and the phonological information both lie in the spectral variations, and therefore are similar with regard to neural mechanisms, the processing of phonological information and that of acoustic information involve the same neural patterns, both in the right hemisphere.…”