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Taking Tone Into Account: Cognitive Neuroscientific Investigations Of Mandarin Chinese Spoken Word Processing, Jeffrey G. Malins

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To date, theories of how humans recognize spoken words have yet to account for tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese. One reason for this is that we know relatively little about how native speakers of tonal languages process spoken words in the brain. This dissertation addresses this problem by examining Mandarin spoken word processing in both adult native speakers and typically developing children. In adults, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess the extent to which the brain regions involved in processing tonal information are distinct from those involved in vowel processing (Chapter 2), while event related potentials …