Developmental differences in the influence of phonological similarity on spoken word processing in Mandarin Chinese

• Published in: Brain and language Vol. 138; pp. 38 - 50
• Main Authors: Malins, Jeffrey G., Gao, Danqi, Tao, Ran, Booth, James R., Shu, Hua, Joanisse, Marc F., Liu, Li, Desroches, Amy S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.11.2014; Elsevier
• Subjects: Age Factors; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Child; Child development; Development; Developmental psychology; Electrophysiology; ERPs; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Incremental processing; Language; Lexical competition; Linguistics; Male; Mandarin Chinese; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Speech Perception - physiology; Spoken word recognition; Top-down processing; Young Adult; ERPs; Top-down processing; Spoken word recognition; Incremental processing; Development; Lexical competition; Mandarin Chinese; Competition; Word; Central nervous system; Lexicon; Electrophysiology; Cognition; Verbal perception; Encephalon; Spoken language; Language; Stimulus similarity; Child; Human; Experimental study; Hearing; School age; Information processing; Language development; Chinese; Speech; Phonology; Event evoked potential
• ISSN: 0093-934X; 1090-2155; 1090-2155
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.09.002

•We examined the development of spoken word recognition in Mandarin using ERPs.•Children and adults resolved different types of phonological competition.•Responses to mismatches in onset, rime, and tone were dissociable in both groups.•The adults showed greater evidence for facilitated processing of rhyming words.•The influence of top-down information was stronger in adults compared to children. The developmental trajectory of spoken word recognition has been well established in Indo-European languages, but to date remains poorly characterized in Mandarin Chinese. In this study, typically developing children (N=17; mean age 10; 5) and adults (N=17; mean age 24) performed a picture–word matching task in Mandarin while we recorded ERPs. Mismatches diverged from expectations in different components of the Mandarin syllable; namely, word-initial phonemes, word-final phonemes, and tone. By comparing responses to different mismatch types, we uncovered evidence suggesting that both children and adults process words incrementally. However, we also observed key developmental differences in how subjects treated onset and rime mismatches. This was taken as evidence for a stronger influence of top-down processing on spoken word recognition in adults compared to children. This work therefore offers an important developmental component to theories of Mandarin spoken word recognition.