Mental representation on prosodic information of second language: study on mandarin Chinese

摘要

Many studies have investigated the nature of the representation on segmental feature of language. However, little is known about the representation on the prosodic information. In this study, dual task experiment was conducted to investigate our mental representation on the prosodic information using Mandarin Chinese. It was found that the articulation behavior interfered with retention of Chinese words, while it had no interference effect on retention of low-pass filtered stimuli made from Chinese words and other types of stimuli. These results indicate that the retention of tone language is realized through unified code by which segmental information was coordinated with suprasegmental information. The possibility of the use of pitch control motor code for retention of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli was also discussed.