title: Neural correlates of acoustic cues of English lexical stress in Cantonese-speaking children.
abstract: The present study investigated the temporal course of neural discriminations of acoustic cues of English lexical stress (i.e., pitch, intensity and duration) in Cantonese-speaking children. We used an event-related potential (ERP) measure with a multiple-deviant oddball paradigm to record auditory mismatch responses to four deviants, namely, a change in pitch, intensity, or duration, or a change in all three acoustic dimensions, of English lexical stress in familiar words. In the time window of 170-270 ms, we found that the pitch deviant elicited significant positive mismatch responses (p-MMRs) and that the duration deviant elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN) response as compared with the standard. In the time window of 270-400 ms, the intensity deviant elicited a significant p-MMR, whereas both the duration and the three-dimension changed deviants elicited significant MMNs. These results suggest that Cantonese-speaking children are sensitive to either single or convergent acoustic cues of English words, and that the relative weighting of pitch, intensity and duration in stress processing may correlate with different ERP components at different time windows in Cantonese second graders.
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Xiuhong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.affiliation: Psychology Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. Electronic address: cmcbride@psy.cuhk.edu.hk.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McBride
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Macao.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Special Education and Counselling, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Kevin K H
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Chung
authors.affiliation: The Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
authors.forename: Chia-Ying
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, United States.
authors.forename: Lan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Shuai
authors.affiliation: Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Xiuli
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tong
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D002648:Child; D003463:Cues; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: English lexical stress processing; MMN; Prosody development; p-MMR