The Processing Of Different Accents In Chinese:an ERP Study

Accents which have been inconvinient for communication among people are a crucial factor affecting language comprehension. In recent years, researches on accented speech comprehension are on the rise and have gained widely attention from psycholinguists and neurolinguists. At present, researches in this field mainly focus on the possible differences in processing strategies in the comprehension of different types of accents. Disputes over this issue divide two groups of scholars who hold different opinions. One group proposes the Perceptual Distance Hypothesis that processing strategies in the comprehension of different types of accents are more or less the same. The other group believes otherwise, that is, the processing strategies concerned are different, embodied in the theory of Different Processes Hypothesis. However, most of these researches are behavioral studies using Indo-European materials instead of Chinese materials.Through sentence judging tasks, this research makes use of ERP technology to systematically investigate how do Chinese listeners comprehend different types of Chinese accents, including Chinese regional accents and Chinese foreign accents. It is meant to determine wether Chinese listeners use different accent processing strategies when comprehending different types of Chinese accents.This research concludes as follows:(1) ERP components, such as PMN and N400, were elicited from Chinese native speakers in their comprehension of different types of accents, which means that the bottom-up pre-lexical phonological processing and the top-down interference of lexical representations are involved in the processing of different types of accents. Typological graphs of the brain show that the right hemisphere also takes part in the processing of Chinese accents.(2) Similar PMN and N400 were elicited for different regional accents from Chinese native speakers, which demonstrates that processing strategies used by Chinese native speakers in the comprehension of different regional accents are probably the same.(3) Different PMN and N400 were elicited from Chinese native speakers in the comprehension of different non-native accents, which proves that different processing strategies are used in the comprehension of different non-native accents.(4) The result doesn’t support the Perceptual Distance Hypothesis or the Different Processes Hypothesis. We believe that Chinese native speakers comprehend different types of accents by using different strategies as the situation demands. They did not just resort to a single and fixed processing strategy while processing one accent. And the choice of which processing strategy is dependent upon the phonological accessibility of the accents in question.