Abstract
Classical Chinese poems have strict regulations on the acoustic pattern of each syllable and are semantically meaningless. Using such poems, this study characterized the temporal order of tone and vowel processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). The target syllable of the poem was either correct or deviated from the correct syllable at tone, vowel or both levels. Vowel violation elicited a negative effect between 300 and 500 ms regardless of the tone correctness, while tone violation elicited a positive effect between 600 and 1000 ms. The results suggest that the vowel information was available earlier than the tone information. Moreover, there was an interaction between the effect of vowel and tone violations between 600 and 1000 ms, showing that the vowel violation produced a positive effect only when the tone was correct. This indicates that vowel and tone processing interacts in the later processing stage, which involves both error detection and reanalysis of the spoken input. Implications of the present results for models of speech perception are discussed.
Highlights
In Mandarin Chinese, each syllable comprises of three components, namely, initial sound, final sound and tone
event-related potentials (ERPs) Results Two time windows were selected for the statistical analysis based on visual inspection: 300–500 ms and 600–1000 ms
Simple effect analysis performed to test the Vowel violation effect in each region showed that the incorrect vowel conditions elicited larger negativities than the correct vowel conditions in the right hemisphere (F(1,19) = 6.05, p = .024), but not in the left hemisphere (F(1,19) = .67, p = .425) and the midline (F(1,19) = 2.67, p = .119)
Summary
In Mandarin Chinese, each syllable comprises of three components, namely, initial sound, final sound and tone. The initial sound is normally a consonant, while the final sound generally contains at least one vowel. The variation of tone (high, low, rising, and falling) is mainly carried by the final sound, and is marked on the primary vowel [1]. Both consonant and vowel belong to segmental information, because they can be separated and occur in a distinct temporal order. Listeners have to rely on tonal information to distinguish the meaning of Chinese syllables except for segmental information
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