School of International Studies, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, 225127 Jiangsu Province, P. R. China.
School of Educational Sciences, Liaocheng University, Liaocheng, 252000 Shandong Province, P. R. China.
J Integr Neurosci. 2021 Mar 30;20(1):131-136. doi: 10.31083/j.jin.2021.01.301.
The neutral tone is a unique tone form in Mandarin as it distinguishes from four canonical tones or full tones on the one hand and integrates phonetic, morphological, syntactical and prosodic information on the other hand. Research to date has been focusing on its unique and variant acoustic features. However, little is known about how native Mandarin speakers process such a unique tone. In the present study, the mismatch negativity was used to explore the comparison-based pre-attentive change detection of Mandarin neutral tone. The mismatch negativity at the time window of 400-800 ms post-first-tone onset was obtained by subtracting event-related potentials to standard neutral tone from event-related potentials to a deviant natural tone. The source analysis of mismatch negativity showed the cortex generator was located at the left temporal lobe. The data suggest that Chinese native speakers process neutral tone automatically under non-attentional conditions, as revealed by the mismatch negativity data aligned with a neutral tone, and that neutral tone does exist as an automatically recognizable one in native Mandarin speakers' tone system.
中声调是普通话中一种独特的声调形式,它一方面有别于四个标准声调或全声调,另一方面又整合了语音、形态、句法和韵律信息。迄今为止的研究一直集中在其独特和变体的声学特征上。然而,对于母语为普通话的人如何处理这种独特的声调,我们知之甚少。在本研究中,使用失匹配负波来探索普通话中声调的非注意预加工比较检测。通过从标准中声调的事件相关电位中减去偏离自然声调的事件相关电位,获得第一声调起始后 400-800 毫秒的失匹配负波。失匹配负波的源分析表明,大脑皮层发生器位于左颞叶。数据表明,母语为普通话的人在非注意条件下自动处理中声调,这一点与与中声调对齐的失匹配负波数据一致,并且中声调在母语为普通话的人的声调系统中确实作为一种自动可识别的声调存在。