Study On Spatial Representations Of Mandarin Tone

The essence of the Mandarin tone is the pitch change,but the tone has both acoustic pitch properties and linguistic contour properties,where the contour is the most important feature of the tone.In the study of linguistics,Chinese native speakers have the advantage of contour perception in tone processing.However,most of the research stays at the level of phenomenon,lacking the researches about the mental representation of the tone.Firstly,the contour is used as the basic attribute of the tone,and has a distinct visual space characteristic.Secondly,because there is a transfer effect between the tone and the music,the two share the pitch property,and many studies find that the music has a spatial-pitch association of response coding effect,so Mandarin tones are likely to be represented in the same way as space.Therefore,this study adopts the spatial association coding paradigm,and selects two types of tone,which are tone 2(T2)and tone 4(T4)having distinct and contrasting contour features,trying to explore whether the mental representation of Mandarin tones is spatial representation and the degree of precision of its spatial representation.This study consists of four experiments:The first experiment is to investigate whether the tone representation of the tone is a spatial representation in the vertical direction.Using the tone recognition task of 2(tone:T2,T4)x 2(reaction key:upper key,lower key),it is found that the T2 is connected with the upper space,and the T4 is connected to the space below,which proves that the tone has a spatial representation in the vertical direction.The second experiment is to further explore whether the tone can induce the corresponding attentional space transfer.The tone is used as the priming stimulus,and the dot-probe task is used to set the vertical dichotomy(experiment 2a)and the quadrant(experiment 2b)respectively.It is also found that the T2 is connected with the upper space,and the T4 is connected to the space below,which further proves that the tone has a vertical spatial representation.The third experiment is to explore the degree of precision of tonal spatial representation.Using the flanker orientation discrimination task of 2(tone:T2,T4)x 4(target orientation:(?),(?),(?),(?)),it is found that the T2 is connected with the upper right((?)),and T4 is linked with the lower right(?),which proves that the tones have a precise spatial representation.In the fourth experiment,it is used to investigate whether the spatial representation of the tone is a specific vertical direction representation.The dot-probe task with the horizontal direction of the reaction direction is used,and it is found that there is no connection between the two tonal modes and the horizontal spatial position.Spatial representation of the tone is a specific vertical direction representation.This study has the following conclusions:(1)The psychological representation of Mandarin tones is coded in spatial form and is a refined spatial representation,but subject to the experimental task,accurate representations appear only in the orientation-based discrimination tasks based on contour features;(2)The tonal spatial representation of Mandarin is likely to be derived from the most important tonal contour feature of tonality,and is influenced by the acquired language features such as the tone of the phonetic mark and the tone of the tonal learning.