Chinese tone and vowel processing exhibits distinctive temporal characteristics: an electrophysiological perspective from classical Chinese poem processing

Classical Chinese poems have strict regulations on the acoustic pattern of each syllable and are semantically meaningless. Using such poems, this study characterized the temporal order of tone and vowel processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). The target syllable of the poem was either corr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2014-01, Vol.9 (1), p.e85683-e85683
Main Authors: Li, Weijun, Wang, Lin, Yang, Yufang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Behavior
Behavioral sciences
Biology
Chinese languages
Electrophysiological Phenomena
Engineering
Error detection
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Exhibitions
Female
Humans
Influence
Information processing
Laboratories
Laws, regulations and rules
Male
Medicine
Natural language processing
Phonetics
Poetry
Reaction Time - physiology
Semantics
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Speech
Speech Acoustics
Speech perception
Studies
Temporal variations
Tone
Vowels
Wavelet Analysis
Young Adult
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Summary:Classical Chinese poems have strict regulations on the acoustic pattern of each syllable and are semantically meaningless. Using such poems, this study characterized the temporal order of tone and vowel processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). The target syllable of the poem was either correct or deviated from the correct syllable at tone, vowel or both levels. Vowel violation elicited a negative effect between 300 and 500 ms regardless of the tone correctness, while tone violation elicited a positive effect between 600 and 1000 ms. The results suggest that the vowel information was available earlier than the tone information. Moreover, there was an interaction between the effect of vowel and tone violations between 600 and 1000 ms, showing that the vowel violation produced a positive effect only when the tone was correct. This indicates that vowel and tone processing interacts in the later processing stage, which involves both error detection and reanalysis of the spoken input. Implications of the present results for models of speech perception are discussed.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0085683