Pre-attentive Processing of Mandarin Tone and Intonation: A Mismatch Negativity Study

Abstract

Mandarin tone and intonation are both signaled by variation in pitch patterns while their linguistic functions are different. Here we recorded ERPs to examine the early pre-attentive cortical processing of Mandarin tone and intonation. The results showed that a clear mismatch negativity (MMN) was elicited by the tone contrast, whereas no MMN was obtained for the intonation contrast which was combined with Mandarin tone2. The results indicate that listeners cannot tease apart the declarative and interrogative intonation when the target was Mandarin tone2 at the early pre-attentive stage.