Native Language Experience Shapes Pre-attentive Foreign Tone Processing And Guides Rapid Memory Trace Build-up: An ERP Study Part 2

Liu and Wiener's (2020) findings closely relate to previous studies, suggesting that L2 tone perception and, in turn, the acquisition of tonal words is largely molded by previous language experience. 

The relationship between the shaping of language experience and memory is inseparable. People's daily communication and thinking require language support, and language forms people's way of thinking and habits. Therefore, the richness of language experience directly affects people's memory.

Language experience refers to the language knowledge, language use, and interpersonal skills a person has mastered. By learning and using language, people gradually form their language system, and then use and improve it. This process can not only improve the effectiveness of language communication but also enhance memory.

People with rich language experience are more likely to associate, classify, and express when learning and thinking. They use language fluently, think quickly, and easily connect new knowledge and experience with previous knowledge to build a complete knowledge network. In contrast, people with less language experience have relatively weak thinking ability and memory and often have difficulty expressing or understanding others accurately.

Therefore, we should continue to learn and use language to expand our language experience. Through reading, watching movies, communication, and other methods, you can continuously accumulate new vocabulary, sentence patterns, and expressions, improve your language skills, and thereby enhance your memory. In addition, you can also improve your thinking ability and memory through memory training, multi-angle thinking, self-reflection, etc., and further optimize your language experience.

In short, the shaping of language experience is closely related to memory, and the richness of language experience directly affects people's memory. By continuously learning and using language, expanding our language experience, and strengthening memory training and thinking exercises, we can improve our memory and thinking skills and better cope with challenges in daily life and work. It can be seen that we need to improve memory, and Cistanche deserticola can significantly improve memory, because Cistanche deserticola can also regulate the balance of neurotransmitters, such as increasing the levels of acetylcholine and growth factors. These substances are very important for memory and learning. In addition, Meat can also improve blood flow and promote oxygen delivery, which can ensure that the brain receives sufficient nutrients and energy, thereby improving brain vitality and endurance.

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In this context, it was shown that speakers of contour tone languages differentiate foreign tone contrasts with the help of pitch cues about both tone height and, significantly, tone movement direction (Gandour,  1983). 

Speakers of nontonal native languages(and likely speakers of register tone languages), in comparison, predominantly classify tone contrasts concerning pitch height (Gandour,  1983; Huang & Johnson,  2010), as tone directionality has no word- or syllable-level relevance in their L1. 

This lack of learned attentional focus on tone movement often results in decreased perception proficiency for L2 tone contours for nontonal learners (Burnham et al.,  2015; Liu,  2013; Qin & Mok, 2011; Yu et al., 2019). While familiarity with tone movement and tone height are good general indicators of L2 tone processing, the actual influence of L1 or previously learned tone is likely considerably more fine-grained. 

It has been shown that general attention to movement and specific native phonological categories often guide L2 tone perception and categorization Chen et al., 2020; So & Best, 2014). 

Tonal L1 speakers' knowledge of tone patterning may even lead to their outperforming speakers of nontonal languages at automatic tracking of the L2 tonal phonotactics (Chan & Leung, 2020).

1.2.2 | Electrophysiological indices of L2 tone acquisition

The acquisition of L2 tone can also be studied with the help of electrophysiological measures. Measuring the electric voltage on participants' scalps while they listen to L2 tones can inform how their brains process the incoming information. 

There are different listening paradigms and different electrophysiological responses that are relevant in this respect. The earliest known language-related electrophysiological response is a very early component that emerges in the neural activity around 50 ms after the stimulus divergence point (DP, i.e., the point in time when the stimulus becomes physically different from other stimuli with similar onsets). 

The component at 50 ms post-stimulus has not yet received a uniform label but is characterized by being sensitive to lexicosemantic (MacGregor et al., 2012; Shtyrov & Lenzen,  2017) and syntactic (Herrmann, Maess, & Friederici,  2011) properties of spoken words. Particularly, it is argued to be related to the automatic assessment of words' linguistic properties, such as lexicality status or syntactic category, suggesting it reflects a pre-attentive gating response. 

Although relatively novel, the effect is stable. It has been observed in many different languages (English: Shtyrov & Lenzen, 2017, Finnish: Kimppa et al.,  2015, German: Herrmann et al.,  2009, Danish: Partanen et al., 2017, Chinese: Yue et al., 2014), using varying paradigms (ignore conditions: Shtyrov & Lenzen,  2017, attend conditions: Kimppa et al.,  2015, tasks: Herrmann, Maess, & Friederici, 2011, oddball paradigms: MacGregor et al., 2015, single word presentations: Partanen et al., 2017, sentence presentations: Herrmann, Maess, Hahne, et al., 2011, or acquisition contexts: Gosselke Berthelsen et al., 2020) and different listener populations (healthy adults: MacGregor et al., 2012, children: Partanen et al., 2017, aphasics: MacGregor et al., 2015, or L2 learners: Kimppa et al., 2019). 

For language learning, the component distinguishes newly learned words from nonwords within just minutes of word acquisition/exposure. It can, therefore, serve as an indicator of memory trace formation. The component also seems well-suited for studying tone word processing, as previously illustrated by Yue et al. (2014). 

They played highly frequent Mandarin word forms (i.e., tang3, "to lie down," "to drip," "if," and peng3, "to praise," "to offer," "to clasp") and very infrequent or nonexistent word forms (i.e., teng3, a pseudoword, and pang3, "to weed," a rare word incorrectly introduced by Yue et al. as a pseudoword) to native listeners in a passive listening paradigm. They found an initially reduced negativity to infrequently presented uncommon and nonexistent words compared with frequently presented real words that quickly (i.e., within minutes) increased and became a comparatively larger negativity. 

The same activation pattern has been observed for novel nontonal word forms (Kimppa et al.,  2015). It is believed to signal enhanced activation reflecting an ongoing process of memory trace formation. This lexicality gating response has not, however, been extensively studied for L2 learning. 

Yet, Gosselke Berthelsen et al. (2020) found increased neural activity for pseudowords-or decreased activity for meaningful novel words-in learners with a tonal native language, suggesting an impact of language experience in this early component. However, more research into the effect is needed for both L1 and L2 tone processing. A second electrophysiological response worth mentioning is the mismatch negativity (MMN; Näätänen et al.,  1978). 

The MMN is an automatic, pre-attentive brain response that occurs before listeners are consciously aware of hearing a stimulus and even when they pay no attention to the auditory input (Näätänen & Alho, 1995). 

The response indexes whether the listeners' brains can detect a change in the input stimuli. Specifically, in an oddball paradigm, participants listen to many repetitions of a standard stimulus intermixed with rare occurrences of deviant stimuli. 

Researchers then study the neural responses to see if the difference between standards and deviants has been detected. If this is the case, a stronger MMN response is elicited for the deviant. As regards tone processing, Shen and Froud (2019) found a mismatch of negativity for phonemic but not phonetic tone differences for native speakers. For nontonal learners and nonlearners, in comparison, only pitch intervals but not phonological categories influenced the MMN (Chandrasekaran et al., 2007; Yu et al., 2019). 

Further, MMNs were reduced at large stimulus intervals (Yu et al., 2017). Interestingly, learners with a tonal L1 showed a mixed response. That is, their MMNs varied as a function of both phonemic differences and pitch intervals. This reinforces the behavioral results and suggests a relatively strong influence of the learners' L1 both on behavioral responses and at the preattentive tone processing stages. 

Interestingly, Shen and Froud (2019) showed that the influence of L1-shaped perception is retained, albeit to a lower degree, even in relatively advanced learners. Finally, also relevant in the context of tone processing is a relatively late ERP deflection expressed as N400 or AN (anterior negativity). At a response latency of around 400 ms after the presentation of the stimulus, the N400 is sensitive to semantics while the AN (also LAN, left anterior negativity, since it is often left-lateralized) is indicative of grammar processing (decomposition). 

The N400 is often attenuated outside the focus of attention (McCarthy & Nobre, 1993; Okita & Jibu, 1998), which suggests that responses at this latency are dependent on attention allocation to speech input unlike the very early component at ~50 ms or the fully pre-attentive MMN at ~150 ms. The N400 and AN components are elicited naturally for any attended linguistic input, which makes it possible to investigate how they are affected by different linguistic factors (Blomberg et al.,  2020; Krott & Lebib,  2013). 

Most often, however, both of these responses are investigated in the context of violations, since they are amplified for incongruent or incorrect input. The increase in the N400 or AN due to incongruent/incorrect language is what we will in the following refer to as an "N400 effect" and "AN effect," respectively (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011; Kutas & Hillyard,  1980; Osterhout & Mobley,  1995; RodriguezFornells et al., 2001; Schramm et al., 2019). 

N400 and AN effects have also been observed in the context of tone processing. In languages where tone has a lexical function, changing the tone of a target word changes its lexicosemantic content and thus turns it into a bad fit for the context. 

Such tone mismatches evoke N400 effects in native speakers (Brown-Schmidt & Canseco-Gonzalez, 2004; Ho et al., 2019; Malins & Joanisse, 2012; Pelzl et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2011). In a language where tone has strong associations with following grammatical suffixes, like Swedish, an anterior negativity has been found for tone-suffix mismatches when there is maximal focus on rule-based processing and the grammatical content (Söderström et al., 2017). Several L2 studies have found only limited late N400 or AN effects for L2 tone errors, in particular for nontonal L1 learners.

In a study involving learning a language with grammar-associated tone, beginner and intermediate learners from a nontonal L1 showed neither an N400 nor AN effect before intensive training (Gosselke Berthelsen et al.,  2018; Hed et al.,  2019). 

Similarly, in a study on advanced nontonal L1 learners of a lexical tone language, there was no group-level N400 effect after tone mismatches, although pitch discrimination abilities were high; however, individual learners did show an N400 effect (Pelzl et al., 2021). An N400 effect has also been found for learners with an intensive training paradigm with a limited number of tonal words (Dittinger et al., 2016). 

Directly comparing tonal and nontonal beginner learners' acquisition of words with grammatical L2 tone, it has been found that tone-picture mismatches evoked an N400 effect2 only in learners with a tonal L1 (Gosselke Berthelsen et al., 2021). 

While still relatively sparse, the above-described neurophysiological findings for tone processing support the idea that tone acquisition builds incrementally on phonetic and phonological knowledge. 

Basic phonetic tone discrimination skills precede phonological tone categorization, as suggested by the MMN results. Pure pitch-based discrimination is possible to some degree, even for nonlearners. Only relatively advanced learners with a tonal L1, on the other hand, show MMNs that are influenced by the L2's tonal categories. Finally, tone-meaning associations and lexical and grammatical learning, visible in N400 and AN effects, occur only at very advanced stages of learning or after intensive perceptual and associative training. 

The presented electrophysiological results also stress the beneficial effect of having an L1 tone experience in L2 tone processing. It has been assumed, in this context, that tonal information storage and processing is underpinned by the left planum temporale for L1 speakers of a tone language (Schramm et al., 2018). 

This might be a prerequisite for rapid, more native-like processing of foreign tones. With intensive tone-focused training or at high L2 proficiency, however, learners with a nontonal L1 might be able to overcome native-language biases and produce tone-mismatch-related ERP responses for L2 tone (Dittinger et al., 2016; Hed et al., 2019; Pelzl et al., 2021).

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