Pre-Attentive Processing of Mandarin Tone and Intonation: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Ren, Guiqin; Tang, Yi-Yuan; Li, Xiaoqing; Sui, Xue

doi:10.5772/56503

Cited by 8 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…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.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their results showed a clear MMN effect when subtracting the waveform of the standard from that of the deviant. In another study, Ren et al (2013) adopted a three-stimuli oddball paradigm. The standard stimulus was /lai2/ with statement intonation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2016

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a b s t r a c tEvent-related potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate the online processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin at the attentive stage. We examined the behavioral and electrophysiological responses of native Mandarin listeners to Mandarin sentences, which contrast in final tones (rising Tone2 or falling Tone4) and intonations (Question or Statement). A clear P300 effect was observed for question-statement contrast in sentences ending with Tone4, but no ERP effect was found for question-statement contrast in sentences ending with Tone2. Our results provide ERP evidence for the interaction of tone and intonation in Mandarin, confirming the findings with behavioral metalinguistic data that native Mandarin listeners can distinguish between question intonation and statement intonation when the intonation is associated with a final Tone4, but fail to do so when the intonation is associated with a final Tone2. Our study extended the understanding of online processing of tone and intonation (1) from the pre-attentive stage to the attentive stage and (2) within a larger domain (i.e. multi-word utterances) than a single word utterance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2016

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“…Unlike the literature on English interrogative intonation patterns, research on Chinese interrogative intonation is complicated because of the conflict on pitch perception between tone and intonation (Ren et al, 2013). Moreover, much of the instrumental literature on F 0 contours in Mandarin questions has focused on declarative questions --i.e., questions where there is no morphosyntactic marking of the interrogative function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantitative intonation modeling of interrogative sentences for Mandarin speech synthesis

Tao

Lai

et al. 2017

Speech Communication

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Previous intonational research on Mandarin has mainly focused on the prosody modeling of statements or the prosody analysis of interrogative sentences. To support related speech technologies, e.g., Text-to-Speech, the quantitative modeling of intonation of interrogative sentences with a large-scale corpus still deserves attention. This paper summarizes our work on the quantitative prosody modeling of interrogative sentence in Mandarin. A large-scale natural speech corpus was used in this study. By extracting the pitch contours and fitting the intonation curves, we found that F 0 declination and final lowering both existed in interrogative sentences, while they were claimed to be absent in Mandarin in some previous studies. In addition, the declination function could be modeled linearly, and the bearing unit of final lowering in Mandarin was found to be the last prosodic word in the utterance, regardless of its length, rather than a fixed duration range. It was argued in this study that the difference between this finding and the commonly believed rising intonation of the interrogative sentences resulted from the nonlinear relationship between prosody production and perception. The underlying mechanism for the existence of F 0 declination and final lowering in interrogative sentences is also discussed.

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Neural systems for auditory perception of lexical tones

Kwok

Guo

Yakpo

et al. 2016

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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Previous neuroimaging research on cognitive processing of speech tone has generated dramatically different patterns of findings. Even at the basic perception level, brain mapping studies of lexical tones have yielded inconsistent results. Apart from the data inconsistency problem, experimental materials in past studies of tone perception carried little or minimal lexical semantics, an important dimension that should not be dispensed with because speech tones serve to distinguish lexical meanings. The present study sought to examine the neural correlates of the perception of speech tone using lexically meaningful experimental stimuli. A simple lexical tone perception task was devised in which native Mandarin speakers were asked to judge whether or not the two syllables of an auditorily presented Chinese bisyllabic word had the same tone. We selected bisyllabic words as experimental stimuli because Chinese monosyllables often convey little or very vague meanings due to rampant homophony. We found that the left inferior frontal gyrus, the right middle temporal gyrus and bilateral superior temporal gyri are responsible for basic perception of linguistic pitches. Our interpretation of the data sees the left superior temporal gyrus as engaged in primary acoustic analysis of the auditory stimuli, while the right middle superior temporal gyrus and the left inferior frontal region are involved in both tonal and semantic processing of the language stimuli.

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Pre-Attentive Processing of Mandarin Tone and Intonation: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Cited by 8 publications

References 37 publications

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

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

Quantitative intonation modeling of interrogative sentences for Mandarin speech synthesis

Neural systems for auditory perception of lexical tones

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