Neurophysiological indices of mandarin lexical tone processing: the role of sensory memory and long-term language experience
Item
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Title
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Neurophysiological indices of mandarin lexical tone processing: the role of sensory memory and long-term language experience
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:50cf6a460bec:11971
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identifier
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12632
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Creator
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Yu, Yan H.,
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Contributor
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Valerie L. Shafer
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Neurosciences | Physiological psychology | Event-related Potential | Interstimulus interval | Late negativity | Lexical tone | Mandarin Chinese | Mismatch negativity
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Abstract
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Language experience enhances discrimination of speech contrasts at a behavioral, perceptual level, as well as at a pre-attentive level, as indexed by event-related potential (ERP) mismatch negativity (MMN) responses. The enhanced sensitivity could be the result of changes in acoustic resolution and/or long-term memory representations of the relevant information in auditory cortex. To examine these possibilities, we used a short (ca. 600 ms) versus long (ca. 2600 ms) interstimulus interval in a passive, oddball discrimination task while obtaining ERPs. These ISI differences were used to test whether cross-linguistic differences in processing Mandarin lexical tone are a function of differences in acoustic resolution and/or differences in long-term memory representations. Mandarin and English listeners listened to bisyllabic nonword tokens that differed in lexical tone categories using a multiple oddball paradigm. The results revealed robust MMNs to both easy and difficult tone differences for both groups at short ISIs. At long ISIs, there was no change or an enhanced MMN in the Mandarin group, but reduced MMN amplitude in the English group. In addition, Mandarin listeners showed a larger late negativity (LN) discriminative response than the English listeners for tone contrasts in the long ISI condition. Lack of robust MMN and LN to tone contrasts in English listeners under the long ISI condition suggests that English listeners do not maintain long-term memory representations of lexical tones that are sufficient for discriminating phonemically different Mandarin tones. These results support the claim that language experience modulates neural representation of lexical tones, largely at the phonemic level. They also suggest that the acoustic correlates of tone are fairly robust and easily discriminated at short ISIs, when the auditory memory trace is strong. At longer ISIs beyond 2.5 s language-specific experience is necessary for robust discrimination.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech and Hearing Sciences
