Integral perception, but separate processing: The perceptual normalization of lexical tones and vowels

Zhang, Kaile; Sjerps, Matthias J.; Peng, Gang

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107839

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Although the role and neural mechanisms of segmental and tonal information in Chinese processing have been extensively studied, most research has focused on speech perception or recognition ( Ye and Connine, 1999 ; Gandour et al, 2003 ; Tong et al, 2008 ; Li et al, 2010 , 2013 , 2014 ; Hu et al, 2012 ; Zhao et al, 2016 ; Choi et al, 2017 ; Zou et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ; Chang and Hsieh, 2022 ), while few has examined the role of segmental and tonal information in speech production ( Liu et al, 2006 ; Wong and Chen, 2008 , 2009 , 2015 ; Zhang and Damian, 2009 ; Wang et al, 2015 ; Wiener and Turnbull, 2016 ). To the best of our knowledge, only one study has systematically investigated the processing of consonant, vowel, and tone during Cantonese spoken word production in a PWI paradigm ( Wong and Chen, 2008 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, few studies have systematically manipulated consonant, vowel, and tone in their experimental designs. Some studies either never distinguish between consonant and vowel ( Brown-Schmidt and Canseco-Gonzalez, 2004 ; Schirmer et al, 2005 ; Zhang and Damian, 2009 ) or compared only one of them with tone ( Liu et al, 2006 ; Luo et al, 2006 ; Hu and Xu, 2011 ; Hu et al, 2012 ; Li et al, 2014 ; Choi et al, 2017 ; Zou et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ). In contrast, the present study further separated consonant and vowel as segmental information to provide a more complete picture of the comparisons among consonant, vowel, and tone processing during Chinese word production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The words “戏剧” (drama) and “喜剧” (comedy) have the same segmental information in Chinese, namely “xi-ju,” but their tonal information is different (戏剧: xi4-ju4; 喜剧: xi3-ju4), resulting in different pronunciations and meanings. Given the importance of tonal information in Chinese, the relative role of tonal and segmental information in tonal language processing has attracted considerable attention from researchers ( Ye and Connine, 1999 ; Gandour et al, 2003 ; Tong et al, 2008 ; Malins and Joanisse, 2010 ; Hu et al, 2012 ; Li et al, 2013 , 2014 ; Zhao et al, 2016 ; Choi et al, 2017 ; Zou et al, 2020 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of consonant, vowel and tone during Chinese typing: an fNIRS study

Yu,

Zou,

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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Many studies have explored the role of consonant, vowel, and tone in Chinese word identification or sentence comprehension. However, few studies have explored their roles and neural basis during Chinese word production, especially when involving neural basis. The present fNIRS study investigated the neural mechanisms of consonant, vowel, and tone processing during Chinese typing. Participants were asked to name the Chinese characters displayed on a computer screen by typing on a keyboard while hearing a simultaneously presented auditory stimulus. The auditory stimulus was either consistent with the characters’ pronunciation (consistent condition) or mismatched in the consonant, vowel, or tone of the character pronunciation. The fNIRS results showed that compared with the consistent condition (as baseline), the consonant mismatch condition evoked lower levels of oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus Broca’s triangle and left superior temporal gyrus. Vowel mismatch condition evoked a higher level of HbO activation in the top of the left inferior frontal gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus. The regions and patterns of brain activation evoked by tone mismatch were the same as those of vowel mismatch. The study indicated that consonant, vowel and tone all play a role in Chinese character production. The sensitive brain areas were all in the left hemisphere. However, the neural mechanism of consonant processing differed from vowel processing in both brain regions and patterns, while tone and vowel processing shared the same regions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of consonant, vowel and tone during Chinese typing: an fNIRS study

Yu,

Zou,

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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“…Huang et al observed that the widespread negativities of vowel violation started earlier than that of tonal violation in the Mandarin-idiom recognition task [20]. In the perception of Chinese classic poems [21], an N450 effect in vowel violation was observed, and a late positive component in tone violation was found between 600 and 1000 ms. Zhang et al investigated the time course of lexical tone normalization and vowel normalization [22]. The effect of vowel normalization was observed within the N2 time window (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoding lexical tones and vowels in imagined tonal monosyllables using fNIRS signals

Guo¹,

Chen²

2022

J. Neural Eng.

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Objective. Speech is a common way of communication. Decoding verbal intent could provide a naturalistic communication way for people with severe motor disabilities. Active brain computer interaction (BCI) speller is one of the most commonly used speech BCIs. To reduce the spelling time of Chinese words, identifying vowels and tones that are embedded in imagined Chinese words is essential. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been widely used in BCI because it is portable, non-invasive, safe, low cost, and has a relatively high spatial resolution. Approach. In this study, an active BCI speller based on fNIRS is presented by covertly rehearsing tonal monosyllables with vowels (i.e., /a/, /i/, /o/, and /u/) and four lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese (i.e., tones 1, 2, 3, and 4) for 10 s. Main results. fNIRS results showed significant differences in the right superior temporal gyrus between imagined vowels with tone 2/3/4 and those with tone 1 (i.e., more activations and stronger connections to other brain regions for imagined vowels with tones 2/3/4 than for those with tone 1). Speech-related areas for tone imagery (i.e., the right hemisphere) provided majority of information for identifying tones, while the left hemisphere had advantages in vowel identification. Having decoded both vowels and tones during the post-stimulus 15 s period, the average classification accuracies exceeded 40 % and 70 % in multiclass (i.e., four classes) and binary settings, respectively. To spell words more quickly, the time window size for decoding was reduced from 15 s to 2.5 s while the classification accuracies were not significantly reduced. Significance. For the first time, this work demonstrated the possibility of discriminating lexical tones and vowels in imagined tonal syllables. In addition, the reduced time window for decoding indicated that the spelling time of Chinese words could be significantly reduced in the fNIRS-based BCIs.

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“…Cantonese speakers’ perception of three level tones was improved significantly (from 48.6% to above 90%) when the isolated tonal stimuli were embedded into speech contexts ( Wong and Diehl, 2003 ). Wong and Diehl (2003) and Zhang et al (2013 , 2017 , 2021 ) reported that an ambiguous Cantonese middle-level tone is more frequently perceived as the high-level tone after a context of low F0 and perceived as the low-level tone after a context of high F0, indicating a contrastive context effect in the lexical tone normalization process.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process

2021

Self Cite

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Listeners utilize the immediate contexts to efficiently normalize variable vocal streams into standard phonology units. However, researchers debated whether non-speech contexts can also serve as valid clues for speech normalization. Supporters of the two sides proposed a general-auditory hypothesis and a speech-specific hypothesis to explain the underlying mechanisms. A possible confounding factor of this inconsistency is the listeners’ perceptual familiarity of the contexts, as the non-speech contexts were perceptually unfamiliar to listeners. In this study, we examined this confounding factor by recruiting a group of native Cantonese speakers with sufficient musical training experience and a control group with minimal musical training. Participants performed lexical tone judgment tasks in three contextual conditions, i.e., speech, non-speech, and music context conditions. Both groups were familiar with the speech context and not familiar with the non-speech context. The musician group was more familiar with the music context than the non-musician group. The results evidenced the lexical tone normalization process in speech context but not non-speech nor music contexts. More importantly, musicians did not outperform non-musicians on any contextual conditions even if the musicians were experienced at pitch perception, indicating that there is no noticeable transfer in pitch perception from the music domain to the linguistic domain for tonal language speakers. The findings showed that even high familiarity with a non-linguistic context cannot elicit an effective lexical tone normalization process, supporting the speech-specific basis of the perceptual normalization process.

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Integral perception, but separate processing: The perceptual normalization of lexical tones and vowels

Cited by 12 publications

References 50 publications

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of consonant, vowel and tone during Chinese typing: an fNIRS study

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of consonant, vowel and tone during Chinese typing: an fNIRS study

Decoding lexical tones and vowels in imagined tonal monosyllables using fNIRS signals

Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process

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