An ERP Study Of The Vocabulary Tone Perception In The Pre-attention Stage Of Mandarin Chinese

Accurate perception of the lexical tones in mandarin Chinese is an important foundation for the successful processing of spoken Chinese.Previous studies have shown that there is a decline in the auditory and prosodic perception of the elderly,and several behavioral research showing that there is a decline in the lexical tone perception of the mandarin elderly.Previous studies mostly detected the state of attention and focused on area general factors how to effect the elderly's processing of segmental phonemes,for example,vowels and consonants,or the lexical tones.Some studies showed that lexical tone perception may be domain specific,so it is possible that this processing is also area specific in aging,but no research has probed the problem directly.The present study examined the neurophysiological,particularly MNN.The current study aims at explore whether the aging of mandarin tone perception of the elderly is language specific,at the same time probe the role of other general factors.The current study recruited 16 healthy mandarin elderly adults and 16 young mandarin adults.The study contains three experiments.Experiment 1 is the tone category perception EEG experiment,the aim of which is to explore whether mandarin old people's ability of processing the knowledge of category of lexical tone is decline or reserved when they perceive the lexical tone in pre-attention condition.Experiment 2 were non-speech perception experiment.It was designed to explore whether the age-related change in tone perception is language specific at the level of more general speech tone.Another purpose of this experiment is to detect the relationship between general auditory function and lexical tone perception in pre-attention condition in aging of mandarin old people.Experiment 3 is high-order cognitive function experiment.The purpose of the experiment is to explore the relationship between the mandarin old people's general high-order cognitive function and lexical tone perception in pre-attention condition.The results of tone category EEG experiment show that across-category contrast elicited a larger MMN than within-category distinction for mandarin young group,while the elderly group did not show the enhanced effect of category change.At the same time,In the across-category condition,compared with the young group,the elderly group respond a smaller MMN,and there is no between-group difference in the within-category condition.The above results indicate that mandarin old people's ability of processing the specific knowledge of Chinese tone category declined.The results of the non-speech perception experiment show that non-speech tone elicit large MMN amplitude of the young group than speech tone which have the totally same pitch change,while the elderly group didn't show the speech enhancement effect.Besides,compared with the young group,the amplitude of the old group's MMN elicited by the non-speech contrast is significantly smaller.The above results indicate that the elderly 's ability of processing the general speech tone is less influenced by age than the non-speech tone.Non-speech perception experiments also show that,for the elderly group,there is no significant correlation between the MMN response elicited by the pure tone pitch contrast and MMN response elicited by the lexical tone.This indicates that the decline of pre-attention central auditory processing of pure tone has nothing to do with the reservation and decline of lexical tone perception.This result,as well as the the result of the difference between MMN elicited by non-speech tone and speech tone,provides evidence for the suggestion that the decline of general decline of the central auditory processing function isn't relate to the pre-attention processing of lexical tone.In addition,when the sense level of auditory input stimulus was controlled according to the peripheral hearing,the decline of peripheral auditory function was not related to the reservation and decline of lexical tone perception in the current study.The results of non-speech perceptual experiment show that the mandarin old people's performance of the lexical tone perception in pre-attention condition is not related to the decline of the general auditory function.The results of high-order cognitive function experiment show that there is no significant correlation between the results of all higher-order cognitive function test and the MMN respond elicited by tone contrast,which suggests that the decline of working memory,executive function,short-term memory,as well as the slow of general processing speed are not related to reservation and decline of lexical tone perception.In the current study,there is no evidence that the decline of the area-general factors affects the tone perception in the pre-attention condition of mandarin old people.On this basis,this study further speculated that mandarin old people's ability of lexical tone perception in pre-attention condition is reserved and declined language specifically,and the above mentioned decline in the processing of knowledge of mandarin tone category and reservation in the processing of the speech tone in a wider sense are language specific.The present study provides evidence for the language aging area specific theory.