| Chinese is a tone language,which main characteristic is reflected by spoken word phonological information.The semantic meanings of Chinese words are carried both by segmental information(such as vowels and consonants)as well as suprasegmental information(such as tone).Besides there is very little co-variation between segmental and suprasegmental information.Mandarin contains four tones,and in accordance with the phonological it can be divided: high level tones(T1),tone(T2),falling tone(T3)and the whole tone(T4).And that there are different tones on the acoustic characteristics of different similarity(Xu,1997).This study aimed at mandarin tone on the acoustic characteristics of the different characteristics of different similarity,using the method of ERP and passive oddball paradigm to investigate the processing of different tones of Mandarin Chinese in the pre-attention stage of adults and children to reveal the influence of different similarity degree of lexical tones on the processing stage of adult and preschool children.In order to avoid the influence of lexical semantics,frequency,and other factors,the non phonetic Version(hummed)corresponding to the tone of the standard syllable is used in the experiment.There are two experiments in this study,each of which contains the following experimental conditions: Syllable 13 tone T1 / T3;Pitch 13 tone T1 / T3;Syllable 23 tone T2 / T3;Pitch 23 tone T2 / T3.The probability of standard stimulus and deviation stimulus were 90% and 10% respectively.It was found that the syllable T1/T3 and pitch T1/T3 in both adults and young children were cited by the mismatch negativity(MMN),the syllable T2/T3 and the pitch T2/T3 only in adults were subjects cited in the MMN.The average amplitude of MMN in adults and young children caused by syllable and pitch T1/T3 was significantly higher than that of the average amplitude of MMN induced by T2/T3 and pitch.The results show that,in the pre-attention processing stage,the processing of Mandarin tones in adults is mainly processed by the left hemisphere of the brain,but children are mainly manifested in the right hemisphere of the brain processing advantages. |
