Sound-sized segments are significant for Mandarin speakers.

ABSTRACT: Do speakers of all languages use segmental speech sounds when they produce words? Existing models of language production generally assume a mental representation of individual segmental units, or phonemes, but the bulk of evidence comes from speakers of European languages in which the orthographic system codes explicitly for speech sounds. By contrast, in languages with nonalphabetical scripts, such as Mandarin Chinese, individual speech sounds are not orthographically represented, raising the possibility that speakers of these languages do not use phonemes as fundamental processing units. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) combined with behavioral measurement to investigate the role of phonemes in Mandarin production. Mandarin native speakers named colored line drawings of objects us

SUBMITTER: Qu Q 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3435182 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature