Cognitive Processing Of Mandarin T3 Sandhi At Vocabulary And Sentence Levels In Different Tasks

Spoken language recognition is a key aspect of language understanding.In order to recognize words,segment and suprasegmental information must be extracted from speech signals and then mapped to the internal representation of the mental dictionary.However,there are many variable factors in speech signals in spoken language,among which a common example of variable factor is the phenomenon of speech alternation,that is,words take on different surface implementation forms in different speech contexts,which poses a challenge to vocabulary access and spoken language recognition.Most of the previous research on phonetic alternation has focused on consonant changes in the phonological system of non-tonal languages.In fact,most of the world’s languages contain three sources of phoneme variation:consonants,vowels,and tones.Therefore,there are also a large number of speech alternations in tonal language.Among them,the phenomenon of three-tone transposition（T3 sandhi）in Mandarin,which occurs frequently and receives the most attention,that is,when T3（tone3）is followed by another T3,the first T3 becomes T2.In this study,we propose to use ERP technology to explore the cognitive processing process of Mandarin triphonic transposition from the vocabulary level and sentence level.Experiment 1 uses three-tone inflection words as experimental materials,and investigates the cognitive processing of T3 sandhi at the vocabulary level under different tasks through the naturalness scoring task and the vocabulary detection task.There are three levels of inflection words in the experimental materials,namely T2T3,which correctly uses the rule of three-tone inflection,T3T3,which does not undergo transposition,and T4T3,which uses T4 instead of T3 to cause tonal violation.The results showed that T3T3 induced smaller N1 effects and significantly larger P2 effects compared with T2T3 conditions.The results show that the listener can pay attention to and recognize the tone at an early stage in both tasks,reflecting that during the processing of the transposition words,due to the use of the three-tone transposition rule,the listener’s perception of T3T3 needs to be further encoded into a more natural T2T3 and consume additional cognitive effort.T4T3 induces a smaller N400 effect relative to T2T3,indicating that as an obvious tone violation condition,the perception of T4T3 has a higher experimental expectation,so it does not need fine processing,and the cognitive load is smaller than that of T2T3.In summary,the results of Experiment 1 show that there are indeed significant differences in the cognitive processing of different inflection word levels.Different from Experiment 1,Experiment 2 uses sentences containing triphonic inflection words as experimental material to detect the cognitive processing of T3 sandhi at the sentence level under different tasks.The results showed that,taking the T2T3 condition as the baseline,T3T3 induced a significantly smaller P2 effect relative to T2T3,and secondly,T3T3 and T4T3 with tone violation induced a larger P600 effect than T2T3,and the naturalness scoring task also induced a larger P600 effect relative to the word detection task.It shows that T3T3 and T4T3 cause semantic cognitive conflicts in the semantic understanding processing of sentences,reflecting the detection and resolution of errors in sentence processing.Most importantly,through the P2 effect at the vocabulary level and sentence level,the results of this experiment also provide evidence for the insufficient specificity of the storage form of inflection words in the mental dictionary,that is,the T2T3 and T3T3 of the brain psychological dictionary are activated at the same time during the processing of triphonic words.In summary,there are differences in the processing of the three-tone transposition phenomenon of Mandarin under different tasks at the vocabulary level and sentence level,and the vocabulary level shows that the listener adopts a fine way to process the intonation information of the triphonic word,and the listener can quickly and timely identify different types of intonation information.At the sentence level,the listener also processes the intonation information of the inflected words in the sentence in a delicate way,but unlike the vocabulary level,the semantic integration process that occurs in the later stages shows that the processing of semantic and syntactic information at the sentence level seems to be unaffected by the phenomenon of triphonic inflection.