The time course of segment and tone encoding in Chinese spoken production: an event-related potential study

The present study investigated the time course of segment and tone encoding in Chinese spoken production with an event-related brain potentials (ERPs) experiment. Native Chinese speakers viewed a series of pictures and made Go/noGo decisions along dimensions of segmental onset or tone information of picture names. Behavioral data and onset latency of the N200 effect indicated that segmental information became available prior to tonal information. Moreover, the results of scalp distributions and onset latency patterns of the N200 effect on segmental and tonal decisions suggest that segmental and metrical encoding is relatively disassociated in Chinese spoken production. Our findings provide additional evidence from Chinese as a kind of non-alphabetic language concerning theories of phonological encoding based on alphabetic languages.