The role of phoneme in Mandarin Chinese production: evidence from ERPs.

Mengxia Yu,Ce Mo,Lei Mo,Philip Allen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106486

Abstract

Established linguistic theoretical frameworks propose that alphabetic language speakers use phonemes as phonological encoding units during speech production whereas Mandarin Chinese speakers use syllables. This framework was challenged by recent neural evidence of facilitation induced by overlapping initial phonemes, raising the possibility that phonemes also contribute to the phonological encoding process in Chinese. However, there is no evidence of non-initial phoneme involvement in Chinese phonological encoding among representative Chinese speakers, rendering the functional role of phonemes in spoken Chinese controversial. Here, we addressed this issue by systematically investigating the word-initial and non-initial phoneme repetition effect on the electrophysiological signal using a picture-naming priming task in which native Chinese speakers produced disyllabic word pairs. We found that overlapping phonemes in both the initial and non-initial position evoked more positive ERPs in the 180- to 300-ms interval, indicating position-invariant repetition facilitation effect during phonological encoding. Our findings thus revealed the fundamental role of phonemes as independent phonological encoding units in Mandarin Chinese.

Highlights

Language production involves a series of consecutive stages: Initially, the intended message is formed at the conceptual preparation stage, followed by speech planning during which lexical items are selected and combined according to the grammar of the language, and articulated
We found more positive ERPs induced by overlapping initial and non-initial phonemes from 180 ms to 300 ms after stimulus onset across six regions of interest (ROIs), reflecting robust repetition priming effects during phonological encoding
Our work extends the previous findings of phonemic contribution to Chinese speech production and provides systematic neural evidence in support of the essential role of the phoneme as the fundamental phonological encoding unit in Mandarin Chinese

Summary

Introduction

Language production involves a series of consecutive stages: Initially, the intended message is formed at the conceptual preparation stage, followed by speech planning during which lexical items are selected and combined according to the grammar of the language, and articulated. It has been proposed that syllable and mora, rather than phoneme, serve as the prominent processing unit in spoken Chinese and Japanese respectively, as a result of the natural differences in phonological features across languages [10] This was supported by earlier behavioral findings of robust syllabic repetition priming effects in the absence of priming effects induced by overlapping single phonemes during Mandarin word production [10,11,12,13]. The observed phonemic repetition facilitation might be another instance of the so-called ‘‘initialness effect’’, which refers to the special role of word-initial segments in speech production, e.g. initial phonemes are more frequently involved in speech errors such as segmental exchange, e.g., left hemisphere heft lemisphere [20,21], since there is no evidence of priming effects induced by phonological overlap in a single non-initial phoneme during Chinese phonological encoding. If phonemes serve as fundamental functional units in phonological encoding of Mandarin Chinese, one would predict repetition priming effects for overlapping phonemes in both the word-initial and non-initial positions during Chinese speech production

Results

Discussion

Methods