Pitch accent processing by Uyghur and Chinese bilinguals—Evidence from event-related potentials (ERPs)

Spoken language contrasts to the written language that provides more prosodic features. There is variety of research about pitch accent in different language. But the less attention is paid to the auditory pitch accent processing and representation of the bilinguals. In the present study, the event-related potentials (ERPs) are used to investigate how Uyghur bilinguals represent and process pitch accent in two languages, one is Uyghur language (their mother tongue) and another is Chinese language (their second language). Materials consist of three types of auditory short sentences in both languages, respectively. The critical words are located at the end of the sentences with correct pitch accent, incorrect pitch accent and semantic violation. Our experimental results show that the electrophysiological evidence (N400) when a word was semantically incorrect but we did not find (N400) for incorrect pitch accent in both language. For Chinese language, when bilinguals are heard with incorrect pitch accent (incorrect tone) the subjects retrieved correct items from the mental lexicon although the word was incorrectly accented. For Uyghur language subjects ignored pitch accent in the sentences because of the ratio of pitch accent words in Uyghur language is very low.