Individual differences in processing pitch contour and rise time in adults: A behavioral and electrophysiological study of Cantonese tone merging

One way to understand the relationship between speech perception and production is to examine cases where the two dissociate. This study investigates the hypothesis that perceptual acuity reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs) to rise time of sound amplitude envelope and pitch contour (reflected in the mismatch negativity, MMN) may associate with individual differences in production among speakers with otherwise comparable perceptual abilities. To test this hypothesis, we took advantage of an on-going sound change – tone merging in Cantonese, and compared the ERPs between two groups of typically-developed native speakers who could discriminate the high rising and low rising tones with equivalent accuracy but differed in the distinctiveness of their production of these tones. Using a passive oddball paradigm, early positive-going EEG components to rise time and MMN to pitch contour were elicited during perception of the two tones. Significant group differences were found in neural responses to rise time rather than pitch contour. More importantly, individual differences in efficiency of tone discrimination in response latency and magnitude of neural responses to rise time were correlated with acoustic measures of F0 offset and rise time differences in productions of the two rising tones.published_or_final_versio

Effects of age of acquisition and semantic transparency on reading characters in Chinese dyslexia

This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation. © Cambridge University Press 2010.published_or_final_versio

Delineating picture and Chinese Character recognition: an ERP approach

Poster Session A - Orthographic Processing, Writing, Spelling: no. A21The logographic nature of the Chinese script has often been compared to alphabet scripts and argued that more visual-spatial analysis is required, given that character components are arranged in a fixed square shape (Tan et al., 2001). The analogy between characters and pictographs or line-drawings has led to some discussion of whether the two are similar or distinct in visual-spatial analysis particularly in the right occipital hemisphere (e.g. Yum et al., 2012; Zhang, et al., 2011). Using ERP’s method, this study aimed to address whether visual-spatial analysis of characters is dissociable from line drawings, particularly focusing at the initial occipital P100 ...postprin

The Mechanism of Rising Tone Merger in Hong Kong Cantonese: An Acoustic Approach

Oral Session W2AHong Kong Cantonese (HKC) stands out from other tone languages in the world by having a rich system of tonal contrast. There are six contrastive tones in standard HKC, namely high level, high rising, mid level, extra-low level, low rising and low level tone. However, this highly complex system is in the process of merging (e.g. Bauer, Cheung and Cheung 2003; Mok and Wong 2010a, 2010b). In a production and perception study on contemporary HKC tones conducted by the first and second authors, it is confirmed that the two rising tones, high rising (HR)[35] and low rising (LR)[23], are merged in a subcommunity of HKC speakers. What remains unclear is the mechanism of the merger. Are the HR tone words transferred to the LR tone or vice versa? What are the acoustic differences of the rising tones produced by the mergers as compared with those by the non-mergers? This paper takes on the above questions by examining the acoustic properties of the two rising tones produced by the mergers as well as the non-mergers of two different age groups .....published_or_final_versio

Interactive effects of orthography and semantics in Chinese picture naming

Posters - Language Production/Writing: abstract no. 4035Picture-naming performance in English and Dutch is enhanced by presentation of a word that is similar in form to the picture name. However, it is unclear whether facilitation has an orthographic or a phonological locus. We investigated the loci of the facilitation effect in Cantonese Chinese speakers by manipulating—at three SOAs (2100, 0, and 1100 msec)—semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity. We identified an effect of orthographic facilitation that was independent of and larger than phonological facilitation across all SOAs. Semantic interference was also found at SOAs of 2100 and 0 msec. Critically, an interaction of semantics and orthography was observed at an SOA of 1100 msec. This interaction suggests that independent effects of orthographic facilitation on picture naming are located either at the level of semantic processing or at the lemma level and are not due to the activation of picture name segments at the level of phonological retrieval.postprin

An fMRI study of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgment task to look for converging evidence. The Chinese language constitutes a special case because it has no inflectional morphology per se and a larger classifier than aspect marker inventory, contrary to the pattern of greater verbal than nominal paradigmatic complexity in most European languages. The functional imaging results showed BA47 and left supplementary motor area and superior medial frontal gyrus more strongly activated for classifier processing, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus more responsive to aspect marker processing. We attributed the activation in the left prefrontal cortex to greater processing complexity during classifier selection, analogous to the accounts put forth for European languages, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus to more demanding verb semantic processing. The overall findings significantly contribute to cross-linguistic observations of neural substrates underlying processing of grammatical morphemes from an analytic and a classifier language, and thereby deepen our understanding of neurobiology of human language.published_or_final_versio

Imaging high-dimensional spatial entanglement with a camera

The light produced by parametric down-conversion shows strong spatial entanglement that leads to violations of EPR criteria for separability. Historically, such studies have been performed by scanning a single-element, single-photon detector across a detection plane. Here we show that modern electron-multiplying charge-coupled device cameras can measure correlations in both position and momentum across a multi-pixel field of view. This capability allows us to observe entanglement of around 2,500 spatial states and demonstrate Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen type correlations by more than two orders of magnitude. More generally, our work shows that cameras can lead to important new capabilities in quantum optics and quantum information science.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Near-merger in Hong Kong Cantonese tones: a behavioural and ERP study

Near-merger is a recalcitrant phenomenon in sound change in which speakers are able to differentiate two sounds in production but consistently report that they are the same in perception. This phenomenon challenges the dominant models of phonological processing, and raises methodological questions whether speakers’ judgment can truly reflect their ability to discriminate speech sounds. The present study attempts to provide a thorough assessment of this intriguing phenomenon through performing behavioural and ERP studies on the perception of a tonal contrast (T4/T6) in Hong Kong Cantonese which has been reported to exhibit near-merger in previous studies. The behavioural study adopts auditory discrimination and oral production tasks, whereas the ERP study employs passive oddball task to elicit MMNs. Preliminary findings showed that the results of ERP measures were consistent with that of the behavioural measures. MMNs were found in participants who could discriminate the two tones whereas no MMN was found in participants who failed to discriminate them behaviourally. These initial observations are not only consistent with the existence of near-merger, but also mark the beginning of research efforts into understanding this baffling phenomenon.postprint第3届语言音调方面国际研讨会 (TAL 2012),中国, 南京, 2012年5月26-29日.The 3rd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2012), Nanjing, China, 26-29 May 2012

Awareness of form-sound correspondence in Chinese children with dyslexia: Preliminary results from event-related potentials and time frequency analyses

Developmental dyslexia has usually been characterized as having difficulties learning grapheme-phoneme correspondence and applying the mappings. This study investigates form-sound awareness in Chinese reading-impaired children in terms of regularity, consistency and lexicality effects using event-related potentials (ERP) and time-frequency analysis (TFA). Preliminary data from two Cantonese-speaking male children, one with reading impairment (PR) and one with normal reading performance (CA), performing a character recognition task were collected. ERP results indicated that CA showed a lexicality effect at N400 that was not evident in PR. TFA showed that CA exhibited greater event-related synchronization (ERS) and phase coherence at theta and gamma bands suggesting greater cognitive demand in processing pseudo and irregular characters. An opposite pattern was observed for PR, where greater effort was needed to retrieve information related to real and regular characters whilst failing to respond to pseudo and irregular characters. Greater ERS and phase coherence was also observed for real, pseudo and regular characters at 350-450ms at theta suggesting adequate access to phonological and semantic information for CA compared to PR. Whereas PR showed greater ERS and phase coherence at earlier and later time intervals. These initial findings suggest that PR may have weaker semantic representations and may be less sensitive to the internal structure of characters and its relationship with sounds. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system

Phonological access is an important component in theories and models of word reading. However, phonological regularity and consistency effects are not clearly separable in alphabetic writing systems. We investigated these effects in Chinese, where the two variables are operationally distinct. In this orthographic system, regularity is defined as the congruence between the pronunciation of a complex character (or phonogram), and that of its phonetic radical, while phonological consistency indexes the proportion of orthographic neighbors that share the same pronunciation as the phonogram. In the current investigation, regularity and consistency were contrasted in an event-related potential (ERP) study using a lexical decision task and a delayed naming task with native Chinese readers. ERP results showed that effects of regularity occurred early after stimulus onset and were long-lasting. Regular characters elicited larger N170, smaller P200, and larger N400 compared to irregular characters. In contrast, significant effects of consistency were only seen at the P200 and consistent characters showed a greater P200 than inconsistent characters. Thus, both the time course and the direction of the effects indicated that regularity and consistency operated under different mechanisms and were distinct constructs. Additionally, both of these phonological effects were only found in the delayed naming task and absent in lexical decision, suggesting that phonological access was non-obligatory for lexical decision. The study demonstrated cross-language variability in how phonological information was accessed from print and how task demands could influence this process.published_or_final_versio