2~4岁普通话儿童前注意阶段的声调感知机制

以MMN、p-MMR作为汉语词汇声调感知的神经关联物,探究2~4岁汉语普通话儿童前注意阶段对声调刺激的失匹配响应,关注范畴信息和偏差大小两个因素对儿童感知水平的影响。结果显示:在范畴间大偏差条件下(T1/T3),诱发明显的MMN;在范畴内或小偏差条件下(T3a/T3、T3b/T3、T2/T3),都未诱发显著的MMR。表明:2~4岁普通话儿童正处于声调感知能力的发展过程中,音位信息和声学信息共同影响其声调感知。

Lexical tone perception mechanism in 2- to 4-year-old Mandarin-speaking children in the pre-attention stage

Lexical tones are a key component of tonal language. The accurate perception of different Mandarin lexical tones is essential for Mandarin-speaking children to process spoken Chinese. Previous studies based on the speech perception model of nontonal language proposed perceptual narrowing theory, while later studies indicated that the perception of lexical tones might be more complicated. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are an effective tool that can investigate Mandarin-speaking children's implicit perception of lexical tones. Some studies targeting children's speech perception have demonstrated that mismatch responses (MMRs, including MMN and p-MMR) indicate the development of phonetic representation. Moreover, these studies have provided empirical evidence in this field. However, ages between 2 and 4 years old needs to be explored empirically. The current study used MMN and p-MMR as the neural correlates of lexical tone perception of Mandarin in the pre-attention stage and investigated the development of lexical tone processing mechanisms in 2- to 4-year-old children. In addition, we paid attention to the influence of category information and the size of the deviance at the acoustic level.