Acoustics, Auditory And ERP Experiments On Putonghua Tone

This paper studies whether the phenomenon of good production and poor perception of tones exists in the third tone of Mandarin tone system, and whether we can find some exidence in our brain. We did three experiments (production, perception, ERP experiment) to testing it. In the first experiment, we recorded seven subjects" production in all kinds of conditions, and find that in some kinds of condition, there exists servel subjects in whose production Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3is significantly different in the contour. Then we recorded33subjects’ production in this condition. Filnally we find that there are six subjects in whose production there exists some difference in contour of Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3., which meet the follow-up experiments’need.Then we selected one of thesubjects whose production acts as the speech stimuli, and the remaining five to act as subjects to do the perception experiment (including identifying and distinguishing AX experiments) and ERP experiments. Identify experimental results showed that accuracy rate was about50%, and the distinction experiment about60%, indicating that these subjects can not distinguish well between Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3. The result satisfed our expectations, and this five subjects can also be used for ERP experiments.In the ERP experiment, first we selected a set of zero initial syllables to be as sound stimuli, and in a passive oddball paradigm, Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3were presented to elicit the mismatch negativity(MMN) component. The results showed that the brain wave are different from real word of Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3, and the component might be MMN, while we can’t find some difference from pseudo-words of Tone2-Tone3and Tone3-Tone3. We estimate that the subjects may perceive the difference in the real word, but not be aware of the difference in the pseudo-word, which shows that the familiarity of the meaning of the words may affect subjects perception when subject are in the absence of attention. But the number of subjects is too small to be used, reliable statistical analysis can not be done, so we just give the brief discription of the waveform, the estimation of the conclusion need to be comfirmed by latecomers...