Phonetics & Phonology Forum is a weekly talk and discussion series featuring presentations on all aspects of phonology and phonetics.
The talk presents a study which investigates the electrophysiological signature for Categorical Perception (CP) of lexical tones. Mandarin level and rising tones and nonspeech pitches counterparts are used. Two time regions of MisMatch negativity (MMN) corresponding to level and rising portion of pitch contours are identified. Only the first region of MMN is modulated by deviant types. It is concluded that 1) CP effect of lexical tones has been observed in the pre-attentive stage, mainly from the level portion; 2) in the same stage, brain activates differently to lexical tones from nonspeech pitches; 3) we attribute all the difference observed to language experience but further studies are needed.