The Perception Of Implosive And Voiceless Stop In Chaozhou Min By Mismatch Negativity

A number of studies on implosives have been carried out in the field of phonetics but few from the perspective of neurolinguistics.And due to its special acoustic characteristics,implosives play an important role in language evolution and typology.In Chaozhou,a dialect area in China,some native speakers produce both implosive and voiceless stop in their dialogue,some produce voiceless stop and partly produce implosive,and some only produce voiceless stop.Until now,it is unknown whether the three kinds of native speakers can perceive the difference between implosive and voiceless stop,and the perception of non-native speakers.Thus,the study chooses four groups of subjects: native Chaozhou speakers with,partly with or without implosives,and speakers in northern dialect areas.In a passive oddball paradigm,taken the advantage of mismatch negativity(MMN),this thesis aims to find the neural mechanism of language perception at the level of dialect variants,which includes the effect of language experience and learning effect.The thesis indicates the amplitude of MMN increases as the familiarity of implosive increases.Also enhanced MMN to implosive is found in native northern mandarin speakers who cannot absolutely produce implosives;reduced MMN to implosives is found in native Chaozhou Min speakers.The thesis might make contribution to the interpretation of the relationship between language perception and production,and the categorical perception and learning effect in language processing.