Research Article The Influence of Tone Inventory on ERP without Focal Attention: A Cross-Language Study Hong-Ying Zheng, 1,2 Gang Peng, 3,4,5 Jian-Yong Chen, 6 Caicai Zhang, 3,4 James W. Minett, 2,3 and William S-Y. Wang 2,3 1 School of Sotware Engineering, Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, Shenzhen 518172, China 2 Department of Electronic Engineering, he Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong 3 CUHK-PKU-UST Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity, he Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 4 Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, he Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 5 Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China 6 Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China Correspondence should be addressed to Gang Peng; gpengjack@gmail.com and Jian-Yong Chen; cjyok2000@hotmail.com Received 17 June 2014; Accepted 15 July 2014; Published 28 August 2014 Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani Copyright © 2014 Hong-Ying Zheng et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. his study investigates the efect of tone inventories on brain activities underlying pitch without focal attention. We ind that the electrophysiological responses to across-category stimuli are larger than those to within-category stimuli when the pitch contours are superimposed on nonspeech stimuli; however, there is no electrophysiological response diference associated with category status in speech stimuli. Moreover, this category efect in nonspeech stimuli is stronger for Cantonese speakers. Results of previous and present studies lead us to conclude that brain activities to the same native lexical tone contrasts are modulated by speakers’ language experiences not only in active phonological processing but also in automatic feature detection without focal attention. In contrast to the condition with focal attention, where phonological processing is stronger for speech stimuli, the feature detection (pitch contours in this study) without focal attention as shaped by language background is superior in relatively regular stimuli, that is, the nonspeech stimuli. he results suggest that Cantonese listeners outperform Mandarin listeners in automatic detection of pitch features because of the denser Cantonese tone system. 1. Introduction Pitch perception is very important for tone languages, which utilize pitch patterns to distinguish lexical meanings. For example, in Mandarin, a tone language, the same segmental syllable /ma/ means “mother” when produced with a high level pitch contour but means “hemp” when produced with a high rising pitch contour [1]. Tone languages usually have diferent tone inventories. For example, Mandarin has four lexical tones; Cantonese, another tone language, has six lexical tones. he language backgrounds not only inluence the perception of pitches in speech [2, 3] but also generalize to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task conditions [3, 4]. Recently, many eforts have been devoted to studying the neural bases of language inluence on pitch perception under various conditions regarding the types of stimulus and task. Electrophysiological signals, which can relect neural activity involved in cognitive processing at various levels, are widely used to explore how the brain processes language, for example, at long-term memory traces level [5], at semantic memory level [6], and at syntactic grammatical level [7], and so forth. Before the pitch signal is transmitted to the cortex level, the frequency following responses (FFR) of pitch at the brainstem have been shown to be sensitive to language- relevant aspects of pitch contours but not speciic to speech [8]. To record FFR at the brainstem, subjects do not need to pay attention to the stimuli. Moreover, the information of Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2014, Article ID 961563, 7 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/961563