An ERP Study On Phonological Processing Of Chinese Monosyllabic Words Of Korean Students With High Proficiency

Second-language phonological acquisition is the base of second language acquisition.Chinese phonology especially tone is a common problem for foreign students during Chinese acquisition,which has aroused general concern.Now many researches on Chinese phonological acquisition mainly focus on traditional error analysis,paying less attention to the brain mechanism of second language phonology perception.According to theories of second language phonology perception,inner ways of phonology perception would affect phonology acquisition,and the speech production errors often stem from phonology perception errors.It has been widely established that the success of second-language phonological acquisition can be achieved only by establishing independent phoneme representation in the long-term memory.In recent years,the study on second language phonology perception has become a hot spot abroad but is still lagging behind at home.Moreover,they pay less attention to second language phoneme representation.Based on theories of second language phonology perception,the present study used ERP technology and cross-modal picture-word matching task to investigate the brain mechanism of Korean students with high Chinese proficiency during the phonological processing of Chinese monosyllabic words in comparison with Chinese.We have discovered that the brain mechanism of Korean students with high Chinese proficiency processing the consonants and vowels is similar to Chinese,but the brain mechanism of tones is different from Chinese which performances as the loss of PMN and the weakness of N400.During the process of Chinese tones,the Korean subjects are best at words with falling tone.Furthermore,the fourth tone induces the strongest N400 effect.As a conclusion,Korean students with high Chinese proficiency have established independent consonants and vowels representation but failed to establish tone representation.There are some differences on the process way of segmental phoneme and supra-segmental phoneme.Korean students percept tones in a non-categorical way,the time course of tone processing is slower than segmental phoneme processing.Moreover,tone processing involve different neural basis.Korean students are most sensitive to the fourth tone.Tones may influence the acquisition of Chinese phonology.Therefore,we suggest that tone teaching should run through the course of teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.Tone perception training should be strengthened to promote the establishment of independent tone phonemes representation among foreign students as soon as possible.