Neurophysiological Studies of Mandarin Lexical Tone Acquisition in Early Childhood

Abstract

Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential (ERP) component used as an index for automatic auditory change detection. MMN can be elicited even when the participant does not pay attention to the stimuli (e.g., while they are reading a book or watching a silent movie). Thus, MMN serves as an excellent tool for assessing auditory discrimination, especially in infants and children with limited attention or motivation. Although MMN is well established in adults, the polarity and latency of mismatch responses (MMRs) in infants are highly inconsistent across studies. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive review of a series of MMN studies for Mandarin lexical tone and to understand the effects of age and degree of deviance on MMRs in infancy and early childhood. The findings here suggest that MMN and positive MMR index different functional characteristics and may provide information on when and how speech perception becomes automatic at different developmental stages in children. The transition from positive to negative MMRs may serve as a neural marker for the early identification of atypical language development in children.