Abstract: Chinese is a tone language, in which both lexical tone and intonation is signaled by pitch variation and associated with spectral processing. In the present project, Mandarin Chinese is exploited to address the issues remained unclear in the cognitive processing of speech melody. We aim at investigating the role of Mandarin Chinese lexical tone on the activation of lexical meanings in an early pre-attentive stage and the neural mechanisms underlying processing of Mandarin speech melody in different cognitive stages. Here we combine event-related potential recordings and source estimation (LORETA) to examine the issues as following: (1) the role of Mandarin lexical on the activation of lexical meanings in the early automatically processing indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN); (2) the dynamic patterns of brain responses to lexical tone and intonation at the early stage of speech perception; (3) the dynamic patterns of brain responses to lexical tone and intonation at the late stage of speech perception. Addressing those issues would help to test the current hot arguments concerning the processing of speech melody, and extend the previous theoretical models of speech perception that built on the studies of non-tone languages.

Key words: speech, Mandarin lexical tone, intonation, ERP, LORETA