This study examines the importance of two acoustic features—the F0 height of onset and the temporal location of turning point—in the Mandarin Tone2-Tone3 perception of native speakers and second language learners of Mandarin whose native languages are non-tonal languages. We manipulated the onset pitch and the timing of turning point of the monosyllabic stimuli and presented them to listeners in an identification task. While listeners were labeling the tones of the manipulated stimuli, we recorded listeners’ neural responses by electroencephalography. The behavioral results showed that both native speakers of Mandarin and non-tonal languages used the F0 height of onset and the temporal location of turning point as the cues when identifying Mandarin Tone2 and Tone3. Listeners had more Tone2 responses when the onset pitch of the stimuli was lowered or the timing of turning point was advanced. From the event-related potentials, we discovered that the amplitude of N100 of native speakers of Mandarin was sensitive to onset pitch. Onset pitch and turning point further influenced the amplitude of P350, indicating the integration of acoustic information in the later stage of their Tone2-Tone3 processing. In native speakers of non-tonal languages, the amplitude of N100 and P200 demonstrated sensitivity to the onset pitch but the amplitude of P350 was affected by turning point, suggesting attention being shifted to the temporal location of turning point in the later time window of the perception due to the potential influence of Mandarin experience. The overall results in this study revealed the effect of onset pitch and timing of turning point as well as the effect of native language experience on Mandarin Tone2-Tone3 perception.

Abstract.....i
Table of Contents.....iii
List of Tables.....v
List of Figures.....vi
List of Appendix Figures.....vii
Chapter 1: Introduction.....1
1.1. Lexical tones in Mandarin.....1
1.2. Acoustic cues of Tone2 and Tone3.....2
1.3. Effects of native language experiences on Mandarin tone perception.....5
1.4. Electroencephalography and Mandarin tone perception.....7
1.4.1. Brief introduction of the electroencephalography.....7
1.4.2. Major ERP components in lexical tone processing.....8
1.4.3. ERP studies of Mandarin tone perception.....11
1.5. Research questions of the present study.....14
Chapter 2: Materials and methods.....16
2.1. Participants.....16
2.2. Stimuli.....17
2.3. Paradigm.....20
2.4. Procedure.....21
2.5. EEG data acquisition and preprocessing.....21
2.6. Statistical analyses.....23
Chapter 3: Results.....26
3.1. Descriptive statistics of behavioral data.....26
3.2. Behavioral results of native Mandarin speakers.....30
3.3. Behavioral results of native speakers of non-tonal languages.....31
3.4. Group comparison of behavioral results.....33
3.5. Summary of behavioral results.....35
3.6. ERP waveform overview.....35
3.7. ERP results of native Mandarin speakers.....43
3.8. ERP results of native speakers of non-tonal languages.....44
3.9. Group Comparison of ERP results.....47
3.10. Summary of the ERP results.....50
Chapter 4: Discussion.....52
4.1. Behavioral responses to Tone2-Tone3 identification.....52
4.2. Neural responses to Tone2-Tone3 identification.....56
4.3. Vowel effect on Tone2-Tone3 identification.....59
4.4. Current limitations and future directions.....60
Chapter 5: Conclusion.....62
References.....64
Appendix.....69

Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48.
Blicher, D. L., Diehl, R. L., & Cohen, L. B. (1990). Effects of syllable duration on the perception of the Mandarin Tone 2/Tone 3 distinction: Evidence of auditory enhancement. Journal of Phonetics, 18(1), 37-49.
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2022). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.2.14, retrieved 24 May 2022 from http://www.praat.org/
Cao, R., Wayland, R., & Kaan, E. (2012). The role of creaky voice in Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3 Perception. In Thirteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association.
Chandrasekaran, B., Krishnan, A., & Gandour, J. T. (2009). Relative influence of musical and linguistic experience on early cortical processing of pitch contours. Brain and language, 108(1), 1-9.
Chen, C. (2013). Gestures as tone markers in multilingual communication. In I. Kecskes (Ed.), Research in Chinese as a Second Language (pp. 143-168). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Chen, S., Zhu, Y., Wayland, R., & Yang, Y. (2020). How musical experience affects tone perception efficiency by musicians of tonal and non-tonal speakers?. PloS one, 15(5), e0232514.
Chen, S., Yang, Y., & Wayland, R. (2021). Categorical perception of Mandarin pitch directions by Cantonese-speaking musicians and non-musicians. Frontiers in psychology, 12.
Chen, T. H., & Massaro, D. W. (2008). Seeing pitch: Visual information for lexical tones of Mandarin-Chinese. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(4), 2356-2366
Chun, D. M., Jiang, Y., Meyr, J., & Yang, R. (2015). Acquisition of L2 Mandarin Chinese tones with learner-created tone visualizations. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 1(1), 86-114.
Connolly, J. F., & Phillips, N. A. (1994). Event-related potential components reflect phonological and semantic processing of the terminal word of spoken sentences. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 6(3), 256-266.
Delorme A & Makeig S (2004) EEGLAB: an open-source toolbox for analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics, Journal of Neuroscience Methods 134:9-21.
Friedrich, C. K., Kotz, S. A., Friederici, A. D., & Gunter, T. C. (2004). ERPs reflect lexical identification in word fragment priming. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(4), 541-552
Friedrich, C. K., Kotz, S. A., Friederici, A. D., & Alter, K. (2004). Pitch modulates lexical identification in spoken word recognition: ERP and behavioral evidence. Cognitive Brain Research, 20(2), 300-308.
Gandour, J. T. (1978). The perception of tone. In Tone (pp. 41-76). Academic Press.
Gandour, J. (1983). Tone perception in Far Eastern languages. Journal of Phonetics, 11(2), 149–175.
Gandour, J. T., & Harshman, R. A. (1978). Crosslanguage differences in tone perception: A multidimensional scaling investigation. Language and speech, 21(1), 1-33.
Hao, Y. C. (2012). Second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by tonal and non-tonal language speakers. Journal of phonetics, 40(2), 269-279.
He, Y., Wang, Q., & Wayland, R. (2016). Effects of different teaching methods on the production of Mandarin tone 3 by English speaking learners. Chinese as a Second Language. The journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA, 51(3), 252-265.
Huang, T., & Johnson, K. (2010). Language specificity in speech perception: Perception of Mandarin tones by native and nonnative listeners. Phonetica, 67(4), 243-267.
Huang, Y. (2019). The role of creaky voice attributes in Mandarin tonal perception. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1465-1469). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
Kaan, E., Barkley, C. M., Bao, M., & Wayland, R. (2008). Thai lexical tone perception in native speakers of Thai, English and Mandarin Chinese: An event-related potentials training study. BMC neuroscience, 9(1), 1-17.
Kaan, E., Wayland, R., & Keil, A. (2013). Changes in oscillatory brain networks after lexical tone training. Brain sciences, 3(2), 757-780.
Li, B., Shao, J., & Bao, M. (2017). Effects of phonetic similarity in the identification of Mandarin tones. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 46(1), 107-124.
Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., Kinney, J. A., & Lane, H. (1961). The discrimination of relative onset-time of the components of certain speech and nonspeech patterns. Journal of experimental psychology, 61(5), 379.
Liu, L., Ong, J. H., Tuninetti, A., & Escudero, P. (2018). One way or another: Evidence for perceptual asymmetry in pre-attentive learning of non-native contrasts. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 162.
Lopez-Calderon, J., & Luck, S. J. (2014). ERPLAB: An open-source toolbox for the analysis of event-related potentials. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 213.
Luck, S. J. (2014). An introduction to the event-related potential technique. MIT press.
Luck, S. J., & Hillyard, S. A. (1994). Electrophysiological correlates of feature analysis during visual search. Psychophysiology, 31(3), 291-308.
Malins, J. G., & Joanisse, M. F. (2012). Setting the tone: An ERP investigation of the influences of phonological similarity on spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese. Neuropsychologia, 50(8), 2032-2043.
Moore, C. B., & Jongman, A. (1997). Speaker normalization in the perception of Mandarin Chinese tones. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 102(3), 1864-1877.
Näätänen, R. (1992). Attention and brain function. Psychology Press.
Näätänen, R., & Picton, T. (1987). The N1 wave of the human electric and magnetic response to sound: a review and an analysis of the component structure. Psychophysiology, 24(4), 375-425.
Oldfield, R. C. (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9(1), 97-113.
R Core Team (2022). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.
Shaw, J. A., & Tyler, M. D. (2020). Effects of vowel coproduction on the timecourse of tone recognition. The Journal of the acoustical society of America, 147(4), 2511-2524.
Shaw, J. A., Chen, W. R., Proctor, M. I., & Derrick, D. (2016). Influences of tone on vowel articulation in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59(6), S1566-S1574.
Shen, X. S. (1990). Tonal coarticulation in Mandarin. Journal of Phonetics, 18(2), 281-295.
Shen, X. S., Lin, M., & Yan, J. (1993). F 0 turning point as an F 0 cue to tonal contrast: a case study of Mandarin tones 2 and 3. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 93(4), 2241-2243.
Tsukada, K., Xu, H. L., & Rattanasone, N. X. (2015). The perception of Mandarin lexical tones by listeners from different linguistic backgrounds. Chinese as a second language research, 4(2), 141-161.
Whalen, D. & Xu, Y. (1992). Information for Mandarin Tones in the Amplitude Contour and in Brief Segments. Phonetica, 49(1), 25-47.
Whalen, D. H., & Levitt, A. G. (1995). The universality of intrinsic F0 of vowels. Journal of phonetics, 23(3), 349-366.
Wlotko, E. W., & Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Finding the right word: Hemispheric asymmetries in the use of sentence context information. Neuropsychologia, 45(13), 3001-3014.
Woodman, G. F. (2010). A brief introduction to the use of event-related potentials in studies of perception and attention. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72(8), 2031-2046.
Xi, J., Zhang, L., Shu, H., Zhang, Y., & Li, P. (2010). Categorical perception of lexical tones in Chinese revealed by mismatch negativity. Neuroscience, 170(1), 223-231.
Xu, Y. (1997). Contextual tonal variations in Mandarin. Journal of phonetics, 25(1), 61-83.
Xu, Y., Gandour, J. T., & Francis, A. L. (2006). Effects of language experience and stimulus complexity on the categorical perception of pitch direction. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120(2), 1063-1074.
Yu, A. C., Lee, H., & Lee, J. (2014). Variability in perceived duration: pitch dynamics and vowel quality. In Fourth International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages.
Zhang, L., Xi, J., Wu, H., Shu, H., & Li, P. (2012). Electrophysiological evidence of categorical perception of Chinese lexical tones in attentive condition. NeuroReport, 23, 35–39.