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Temporal Hierarchy and Contextual Facilitation in Mandarin Nasal Coda Processing: A Time-Resolved MEG-MVPA Study

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Xiaoshan Ying¹ (yxs7049@hotmail.com), Li Zhong¹, Yiqing Li¹, Mengyuan Lin¹, Xiaoqi Yang¹, Ling Liu; ¹Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

The neural dynamics of Mandarin nasal codas (/n/, /ng/) and their interaction with syllabic contexts remain underexplored. We utilized Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and time-resolved Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) to delineate these dynamics in 17 participants performing a paired-syllable discrimination task. Participants achieved high behavioral accuracy (>87%). While standard univariate analysis failed to differentiate nasal codas, MVPA revealed a distinct temporal hierarchy. Nasal coda decoding generally onset at ~200 ms, significantly later than vowels and consonants (~120 ms), reflecting sequential sub-syllabic feature extraction. Critically, neural representations were modulated by phonological context. Peak decoding accuracy for nasal codas was significantly higher in /i/ contexts compared to /a/, indicating strong co-articulatory integration. Furthermore, we observed a striking contextual facilitation effect between the first (S1) and second (S2) stimuli. While S1 nasal codas were decoded exclusively in a late window (420–760 ms), S2 processing recruited an additional early encoding window (160–280 ms) prior to the recurring late phase. This distinct temporal emergence suggests that prior context primes the system, accelerating the initial neural encoding of subsequent speech inputs. In conclusion, Mandarin nasal coda processing is hierarchical and highly sensitive to predictive task contexts, supporting models of dynamic, context-dependent speech integration.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition