TY - JOUR A1 - Yue, Jinxing A1 - Bastiaanse, Roelien A1 - Alter, Kai T1 - Cortical plasticity induced by rapid Hebbian learning of novel tonal word-forms: Evidence from mismatch negativity JF - Brain & language : a journal of the neurobiology of language N2 - Although several experiments reported rapid cortical plasticity induced by passive exposure to novel segmental patterns, few studies have devoted attention to the neural dynamics during the rapid learning of novel tonal word-forms in tonal languages, such as Chinese. In the current study, native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were exposed to acoustically matched real and novel segment-tone patterns. By recording their Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses (an ERP indicator of long-term memory traces for spoken words), we found enhanced MMNs to the novel word-forms over the left-hemispheric region in the late exposure phase relative to the early exposure phase. In contrast, no significant changes were identified in MMN responses to the real word during familiarisation. Our results suggest a rapid Hebbian learning mechanism in the human neocortex which develops long-term memory traces for a novel segment-tone pattern by establishing new associations between the segmental and tonal representations. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Language KW - Rapid learning KW - Hebbian learning KW - Event-related potential KW - Novel word KW - Mismatch Negativity (MMN) KW - Oddball paradigm KW - Lexical tone KW - Mandarin Chinese Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2014.09.007 SN - 0093-934X SN - 1090-2155 VL - 139 SP - 10 EP - 22 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Nixon, Jessie S. A1 - van Rij, Jacolien A1 - Mok, Peggy A1 - Baayen, Harald R. A1 - Chen, Yiya T1 - The temporal dynamics of perceptual uncertainty: eye movement evidence from Cantonese segment and tone perception JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Two visual world eyetracking experiments investigated how acoustic cue value and statistical variance affect perceptual uncertainty during Cantonese consonant (Experiment 1) and tone perception (Experiment 2). Participants heard low- or high-variance acoustic stimuli. Euclidean distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures over time was analysed using Generalised Additive Mixed Modelling. Distance of fixations from target and competitor pictures varied as a function of acoustic cue, providing evidence for gradient, nonlinear sensitivity to cue values. Moreover, cue value effects significantly interacted with statistical variance, indicating that the cue distribution directly affects perceptual uncertainty. Interestingly, the time course of effects differed between target distance and competitor distance models. The pattern of effects over time suggests a global strategy in response to the level of uncertainty: as uncertainty increases, verification looks increase accordingly. Low variance generally creates less uncertainty, but can lead to greater uncertainty in the face of unexpected speech tokens. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Discriminative learning KW - Statistical learning KW - Speech perception KW - Cantonese KW - Lexical tone Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2016.03.005 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 90 SP - 103 EP - 125 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Luo, Yingyi A1 - Yan, Ming A1 - Yan, Shaorong A1 - Zhou, Xiaolin A1 - Inhoff, Albrecht W. T1 - Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings JF - The science of the total environment : an international journal for scientific research into the environment and its relationship with man N2 - In two experiments, we examined the contribution of articulation-specific features to visual word recognition during the reading of Chinese. In spoken Standard Chinese, a syllable with a full tone can be tone-neutralized through sound weakening and pitch contour change, and there are two types of two-character compound words with respect to their articulation variation. One type requires articulation of a full tone for each constituent character, and the other requires a full- and a neutral-tone articulation for the first and second characters, respectively. Words of these two types with identical first characters were selected and embedded in sentences. Native speakers of Standard Chinese were recruited to read the sentences. In Experiment 1, the individual words of a sentence were presented serially at a fixed pace while event-related potentials were recorded. This resulted in less-negative N100 and anterior N250 amplitudes and in more-negative N400 amplitudes when targets contained a neutral tone. Complete sentences were visible in Experiment 2, and eye movements were recorded while participants read. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed shorter viewing durations and fewer refixations on-and fewer regressive saccades to-target words when their second syllable was articulated with a neutral rather than a full tone. Together, the results indicate that readers represent articulation-specific word properties, that these representations are routinely activated early during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, and that the representations are also used during later stages of word processing. KW - Lexical tone KW - Neutral tone KW - Articulation duration KW - Syllabic tone KW - Sentence reading KW - Chinese Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-015-0368-1 SN - 1530-7026 SN - 1531-135X VL - 16 SP - 72 EP - 92 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kadyamusuma, McLoddy R. A1 - De Bleser, Ria A1 - Mayer, Jörg T1 - Lexical tone disruption in Shona after brain damage JF - Aphasiology : an international, interdisciplinary journal N2 - Background: The issue of production and perception of lexical tone in patients with brain lesions has been investigated mainly through East Asian languages and Norwegian. The present study investigated the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona, a Bantu language. Van Lancker (1980) proposed a continuum scale of the levels of functional pitch in the speech signal. According to the functional lateralisation account (FLH), the left hemisphere (LH) is associated with highly structured pitch contrasts, such as phonological tone, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) is specialised for the least structured pitch functions cueing emotional and personal information. The extant data show that the ability to produce and identify lexical tone is frequently more impaired as a result of lesions to the LH than RH lesions. Aims: The present investigation focused on the lateralisation of lexical tone in Shona speakers. The study sought to validate if the scale of hemispheric lateralisation as proposed by Van Lancker (1980) is also valid for Shona, a Bantu language. Methods & Procedures: We examined five LH damaged (LHD) patients and five RH (RHD) damaged patients using a confrontational picture-naming task and a lexical tone identification task of Shona lexical tone. The first experiment investigated the ability of LHD patients and RHD patients to identify Shona lexical tone in 60 disyllabic minimal pairs. The second experiment examined the ability of Shona brain-damaged patients to produce lexical tone using a confrontational picture-naming task with 120 lexical items. Outcomes & Results: We observed a dissociation in the performance of both the LHD and RHD patients in the two tasks. Both groups were impaired in the tone identification task relative to the non-brain-damaged controls. However, RHD patients performed significantly better than the LHD patients in the tone identification task. On the other hand, both LHD and RHD groups were equally impaired in the tone production task in comparison to the controls. Conclusions: The discrepancy in the production and perception of Shona lexical tone for this group of brain-damaged patients shows that, although the two modes are related, they do not always get disrupted at the same level after brain damage. The results from the tone identification task suggest to a certain extent that the FLH is also valid for Shona. In order to account for all the data there is need to carefully consider alternative accounts like the acoustic cue hypothesis (Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992). KW - Brain-damaged patients KW - Lexical tone KW - Shona KW - Aphasia KW - Production KW - Identification Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2011.590966 SN - 0268-7038 VL - 25 IS - 10 SP - 1239 EP - 1260 PB - Wiley CY - Hove ER -