Dataset Information

Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non-tonal language speakers.

ABSTRACT: Intonation, the modulation of pitch in speech, is a crucial aspect of language that is processed in right-hemispheric regions, beyond the classical left-hemispheric language system. Whether or not this notion generalises across languages remains, however, unclear. Particularly, tonal languages are an interesting test case because of the dual linguistic function of pitch that conveys lexical meaning in form of tone, in addition to intonation. To date, only few studies have explored how intonation is processed in tonal languages, how this compares to tone and between tonal and non-tonal language speakers. The present fMRI study addressed these questions by testing Mandarin and German speakers with Mandarin material. Both groups categorised mono-syllabic Mandarin words in terms of intonation, tone, and voice gender. Systematic comparisons of brain activity of the two groups between the three tasks showed large cross-linguistic commonalities in the neural processing of intonation in left fronto-parietal, right frontal, and bilateral cingulo-opercular regions. These areas are associated with general phonological, specific prosodic, and controlled categorical decision-making processes, respectively. Tone processing overlapped with intonation processing in left fronto-parietal areas, in both groups, but evoked additional activity in bilateral temporo-parietal semantic regions and subcortical areas in Mandarin speakers only. Together, these findings confirm cross-linguistic commonalities in the neural implementation of intonation processing but dissociations for semantic processing of tone only in tonal language speakers.

SUBMITTER: Chien PJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7268089 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non-tonal language speakers.

Chien Pei-Ju PJ Friederici Angela D AD Hartwigsen Gesa G Sammler Daniela D

Human brain mapping 20200120 7

Intonation, the modulation of pitch in speech, is a crucial aspect of language that is processed in right-hemispheric regions, beyond the classical left-hemispheric language system. Whether or not this notion generalises across languages remains, however, unclear. Particularly, tonal languages are an interesting test case because of the dual linguistic function of pitch that conveys lexical meaning in form of tone, in addition to intonation. To date, only few studies have explored how intonation ...[more]

PMID: 31957928

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Project description:PURPOSE:To investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians' sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing. METHOD:English and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values. RESULTS:Non-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types. CONCLUSION:The effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Project description:BackgroundTone languages such as Thai and Mandarin Chinese use differences in fundamental frequency (F0, pitch) to distinguish lexical meaning. Previous behavioral studies have shown that native speakers of a non-tone language have difficulty discriminating among tone contrasts and are sensitive to different F0 dimensions than speakers of a tone language. The aim of the present ERP study was to investigate the effect of language background and training on the non-attentive processing of lexical tones. EEG was recorded from 12 adult native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, 12 native speakers of American English, and 11 Thai speakers while they were watching a movie and were presented with multiple tokens of low-falling, mid-level and high-rising Thai lexical tones. High-rising or low-falling tokens were presented as deviants among mid-level standard tokens, and vice versa. EEG data and data from a behavioral discrimination task were collected before and after a two-day perceptual categorization training task.ResultsBehavioral discrimination improved after training in both the Chinese and the English groups. Low-falling tone deviants versus standards elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN) in all language groups. Before, but not after training, the English speakers showed a larger MMN compared to the Chinese, even though English speakers performed worst in the behavioral tasks. The MMN was followed by a late negativity, which became smaller with improved discrimination. The High-rising deviants versus standards elicited a late negativity, which was left-lateralized only in the English and Chinese groups.ConclusionResults showed that native speakers of English, Chinese and Thai recruited largely similar mechanisms when non-attentively processing Thai lexical tones. However, native Thai speakers differed from the Chinese and English speakers with respect to the processing of late F0 contour differences (high-rising versus mid-level tones). In addition, native speakers of a non-tone language (English) were initially more sensitive to F0 onset differences (low-falling versus mid-level contrast), which was suppressed as a result of training. This result converges with results from previous behavioral studies and supports the view that attentive as well as non-attentive processing of F0 contrasts is affected by language background, but is malleable even in adult learners.

Dataset Information

Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non-tonal language speakers.

Publications

Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non-tonal language speakers.

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