The Neural Mechanisms Of Mandarin Speech Melody At The Attentive Stage Of Early Auditory Processing

Chinese is a kind of tone language. The semantic information of Chinese vocabulary isloaded on segmental information and suprasegmental information, which have littleco-variation. Compared with written language, spoken language is a more general form ofverbal expression, whose outstanding characteristic is rich in prosodic information. Speechprosody is an important form of prosodic information, which refers to the linguistic pitchmode associated with lexical tone and intonation. The changes of linguistic pitch informationin Chinese can not only represent lexical tone or intonation, but also be reflected in syllablelevel and sentence level.In this research, we aim at investigating the role of lexical tone (high-rising, high-falling)and intonation (state, doubt) in one-single words and three-words sentences at the attentivestage of early auditory processing in the method of ERP. We pay close attention to the MMNcomponent and analysis its latency and amplitude under different conditions. By usinginitiative Oddball paradigm, there are four experimental conditions including high-rising tonewith intonation changed, high-falling tone with intonation changed, state intonation with tonechanged and doubt intonation-tone changed. The stimulus materials under everyexperimental condition conclude standard stimuli and deviant stimuli, whose presentprobabilities are80%and20%. The corresponding stimulus materials of high-rising tone-stateintonation, high-rising tone-doubt intonation, high-falling tone-state intonation, high-fallingtone-doubt intonation are used to be the standard stimulus and deviant stimulus in theexperiment. The participants are asked to distinguish between the two kinds of stimulus andmake keyboard reaction. The results showed that:(1) whether in one-single word andthree-words sentence, the doubt intonation following the rising tone didn’t evoked MMN;(2)at the attentive stage of early auditory processing, participants showed left hemisphericdominance in the procession of lexical tone while bilateral activation in the procession ofintonation;(3) the results support the functional lateralization hypothesis.