As a promising narrow-band phosphor,SrLiAI3N4 has a seemingly ultra-small total crystal-field splitting of only 2400 cm-1 with Ce3+as dopant ions.This paper is devoted to unravel this anomalous phe-nomenon based on semi-quantitative crystal-field calculations.The results show that there may exist undetected excitation peaks immersed in the host excitation band,and the calibrated crystal-field splitting is 27000 cm-1,comparable to those of other Ce3+doped phosphors.In the end the effect of polyhedral deformation on energy level is briefly discussed.