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Previous studies have shown that the effect of language on categorical perception of color is stronger when stimuli are presented in the right visual field than in the left. To examine whether this lateralized effect occurs preattentively at an early stage of processing, we monitored the visual mismatch negativity, which is a component of the event-related potential of the brain to an unfamiliar stimulus among a temporally presented series of stimuli. In the oddball paradigm we used, the deviant stimuli were unrelated to the explicit task. A significant interaction between color-pair type (within-category vs. between-category) and visual field (left vs. right) was found. The amplitude of the visual mismatch negativity component evoked by the within-category deviant was significantly smaller than that evoked by the between-category deviant when displayed in the right visual field, but no such difference was observed for the left visual field. This result constitutes electroencephalographic evidence that the lateralized Whorf effect per se occurs out of awareness and at an early stage of processing.lateralization | Whorfian B ehavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have shown that early processing of color stimuli can be affected by the categories encoded in the language of the observer (1-13). More recently, this "Whorfian" effect in color processing has been demonstrated to be stronger for stimuli exposed in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF) and to disappear in the presence of a concurrent demand on verbal memory. This finding suggests that the use of lexical information in the left hemisphere is the origin of differential visual hemifield responses to color stimuli (14-23). There has been some suggestion that the left cerebral hemispheric areas implicated in important language functions may serve as a top-down control source that modulates the activity level of the visual cortex (24-28), but little is known about whether this lateralized effect occurs at early, preattentive perceptual processing stages or at postperceptual decision/response phases. Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) is widely held to reflect the brain's early and automatic change in event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to a novel stimulus (29)(30)(31). In the present study, the vMMN component is observed in order to assess the lateralized Whorfian response to task-irrelevant changes in color stimuli. There have been several related studies in this area, however. Thierry and associates (25,26) showed in nonlateralized studies with task-irrelevant responses that Greek speakers' vMMN components, starting around 100 ms poststimulus, peaking around 200 ms, and maximal over parietooccipital scalp areas, show sensitivity to the basic lexical distinction in the Greek language between light and dark blue, whereas English speakers show no such effect. Further ERP studies have confirmed early Whorfian effects in nonlateralized paradigms (27,28). [Fonteneau and Davidoff (12) were the first to show a n...

The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association—the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders—remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means ‘teacher’ and ‘to try’ when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). Using the On-line Identification Test of Congenital Amusia, we found Cantonese speakers as a group tend to show enhanced pitch perception ability compared to speakers of Canadian French and English (non-tone languages). This enhanced ability occurs in the absence of differences in rhythmic perception and persists even after relevant factors such as musical background and age were controlled. Following a common definition of amusia (5% of the population), we found Hong Kong pitch amusics also show enhanced pitch abilities relative to their Canadian counterparts. These findings not only provide critical evidence for a double association of music and speech, but also argue for the reconceptualization of communicative disorders within a cultural framework. Along with recent studies documenting cultural differences in visual perception, our auditory evidence challenges the common assumption of universality of basic mental processes and speaks to the domain generality of culture-to-perception influences.

Abstract. A written Chinese character has a more direct connection with its meaning than a written word in English does. Moreover, because there is no unit in the writing system that encodes single phonemes, grapheme-phoneme mappings are impossible. These unique features have led some researchers to speculate that phonological processing does not occur in visual identification of Chinese words or that meaning is activated earlier than phonology. This hypothesis, however, has been challenged by more recent discoveries that suggest that phonology in Chinese, just as in English, is central to the visual recognition system. The present paper reviews the literature on phonological codes as early sources of constraint in Chinese word identification and considers the specific aspects of phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese that may differ from those in English. It emphasizes that early phonological processes and phonological mediation are two different questions in the identification-withphonology hypothesis. 'Mediation' and 'prelexical phonology', two very important concepts in the literature on phonological computation in reading English, are both misleading in Chinese.