Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
Psychophysiology. 2012 Sep;49(9):1179-90. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2012.01406.x. Epub 2012 Jun 29.
Using event-related potentials, this study measured the access of suprasegmental (tone) and segmental (vowel) information in spoken word recognition with Mandarin idioms. Participants performed a delayed-response acceptability task, in which they judged the correctness of the last word of each idiom, which might deviate from the correct word in either tone or vowel. Results showed that, compared with the correct idioms, a larger early negativity appeared only for vowel violation. Additionally, a larger N400 effect was observed for vowel mismatch than tone mismatch. A control experiment revealed that these differences were not due to low-level physical differences across conditions; instead, they represented the greater constraining power of vowels than tones in the lexical selection and semantic integration of the spoken words. Furthermore, tone violation elicited a more robust late positive component than vowel violation, suggesting different reanalyses of the two types of information. In summary, the current results support a functional dissociation of tone and vowel processing in spoken word recognition.
本研究采用事件相关电位技术，考察了汉语成语语音识别中超音段（声调）和音段（元音）信息的通达。参与者完成了一项延迟反应可接受性任务，他们判断每个成语最后一个词的正确性，最后一个词可能与正确词的声调或元音不同。结果表明，与正确的成语相比，只有元音违规时才会出现更大的早期负向波。此外，元音不匹配比声调不匹配引起更大的 N400 效应。一项控制实验表明，这些差异不是由于条件之间的低水平物理差异造成的；相反，它们代表了元音在词汇选择和语义整合中的限制能力强于声调。此外，声调违规比元音违规引起更强的晚期正成分，表明对这两种类型的信息进行了不同的重新分析。总之，目前的结果支持了语音识别中声调与元音处理的功能分离。
