Early access to lexical-level phonological representations of Mandarin word-forms: evidence from auditory N1 habituation

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience . 2017. Vol. 32. No. 9. P. 1148–1163.

Yue J., Alter K., Howard D., Bastiaanse R.

An auditory habituation design was used to investigate whether lexical-level phonological representations in the brain can be rapidly accessed after the onset of a spoken word. We studied the N1 component of the auditory event-related electrical potential, and measured the amplitude decrements of N1 associated with the repetition of a monosyllabic tone word and an acoustically similar pseudo-word in Mandarin Chinese. Effects related to the contrastive onset consonants were controlled for by introducing two control words. We show that repeated pseudo-words consistently elicit greater amplitude decrements in N1 than real words. Furthermore, this lexicality effect is free from sensory fatigue or rapid learning of the pseudo-word. These results suggest that a lexical-level phonological representation of a spoken word can be accessed as early as 110 ms after the onset of the word-form.

Keywords: event-related potentials, китайский язык, лексический доступ, lexical access, вызванные потенциалы мозга, auditory N1, Mandarin Chinese language, spoken word, short-term habituation