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Abstract:
Abstract: This study is using a divided-visual field method
to examine if there is a separate .neural subsystem for Mandarin
tone identification. There are four distinguished tones in Mandarin
language: high flat, rising, diving, and falling tones. Speakers
need to identify the tones for each character in order to
understand its meaning particularly in a conversation. Two tasks
were used to test this hypothesis: word recognition and tone
identification. Presumably, the second task includes additional
tone identification processing. Subjects need to recognize the word
before they can identify the tone. By comparing the results from
the two tasks, we are able to understand if the same part of the
brain is involved in these two processes or if different parts of
the brain are involved. The results suggest that the module for the
Mandarin tone identification locates in the left hemisphere.
Furthermore, subjects need more time to process the diving tone and
also have a lower correction rate comparing to the other three tone
identifications. Especially, subjects made more mistakes whey the
identified diving tone in diving tone-rising tone pairs than the
diving tone- falling tone pairs. These results are supported by
converging evidence in acoustic analyses, which indicates that the
rising tone and diving tone have more similar spectrograms than the
rising tone and falling tone.
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