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Chinese tone imaging references
p.s. Related topic: I believe Bruno Repp (among others)
found that pitch
in Chinese is processed in areas of the brain associated with language
rather than with music.
There's an early paper by Van Lancker & Fromkin that, if I remember
correctly, shows a right-ear advantage (left-hemisphere advantage)
for right-handed native speakers of a tone language (Thai?)
discriminating syllables with different pitch patterns, while
right-handed native speakers of English show no ear advantage. This
is interpreted as suggesting that Thai speakers process spoken pitch
preferentially in the hemisphere dominant for language, while English
speakers do not (and may process pitch preferentially in the right
hemisphere, with music and emotional aspects of speech like "tone of
voice," etc.). More recent imaging work by Gandour and his
colleagues
seems to support this hypothesis. And I'm sure there's been other
imaging work on this topic (by Zatorre?)
Since somone mentioned my name, I thought I would point you to the
references on functional imaging with Chinese speakers, in case any of
you are interested.
- Klein, D., Milner, B.A., Zatorre, R.J., Zhao, V., and Nikelski, E.J.
(1999) Cerebral organization in bilinguals: A PET study of
Chinese-English verb generation. NeuroReport, 10, 2841-2846.
Klein, D., Zatorre, R.J., Milner, B., and Zhao, V. (2001) A
Cross-linguistic PET study of tone perception in Mandarin Chinese and
English speakers. NeuroImage, 13, 646-653
See also some nice papers by Jack Gandour and his colleagues:
Gandour J. Wong D. Hsieh L. Weinzapfel B. Van Lancker D. Hutchins
GD. A crosslinguistic PET study of tone
perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
12(1):207-22, 2000
Gandour J. Wong D. Hutchins G.
Pitch processing in the human brain
is influenced by language experience. Neuroreport.
9(9):2115-9, 1998
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Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D.
Montreal Neurological Institute
3801 University St.
Montreal, QC Canada H3A 2B4
phone: 1-514-398-8903
fax: 1-514-398-1338
e-mail: md37@musica.mcgill.ca