A Meta-Analytic Study of the Neural Systems for Auditory Processing of Lexical Tones

Abstract

The neural systems of lexical tone processing have been studied for many years. However, previous findings have been mixed with regard to the hemispheric specialization for the perception of linguistic pitch patterns in native speakers of tonal language. In this study, we performed two activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses, one on neuroimaging studies of auditory processing of lexical tones in tonal languages (17 studies), and the other on auditory processing of lexical information in non-tonal languages as a control analysis for comparison (15 studies). The lexical tone ALE analysis showed significant brain activations in bilateral inferior prefrontal regions, bilateral superior temporal regions and the right caudate, while the control ALE analysis showed significant cortical activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporo-parietal regions. However, we failed to obtain significant differences from the contrast analysis between two auditory conditions, which might be caused by the limited number of studies available for comparison. Although the current study lacks evidence to argue for a lexical tone specific activation pattern, our results provide clues and directions for future investigations on this topic, more sophisticated methods are needed to explore this question in more depth as well.

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

“…Neuroimaging work has shown that tone processing in native Mandarin speakers involves brain regions for the analysis and abstraction of acoustic signals, and the processing of phonological and/or semantic information. Depending on the experimental tasks, these processes are reflected by increased activity in bilateral fronto‐parietal regions (Gandour, Dzemidzic, et al, ; Gandour, Wong, et al, ; Gandour et al, ; Li, Gandour, Talavage, & Wong, ) or fronto‐temporal areas (Kwok, Dan, Yakpo, Matthews, & Tan, ; for reviews, see Kwok et al, ; Liang & Du, ). Task‐related activity for tone processing was found to be more left‐lateralised when compared to intonation processing, emphasising the linguistic relevance of tonal pitch for semantic processing during language comprehension (Gandour, Dzemidzic, et al, ; Gandour, Wong, et al, ; Gandour et al, ).…”

“…For intonation, we expected increased activation in regions associated with prosodic contour evaluation, such as right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Sammler et al, ). For tone, we hypothesised increased activation in semantic areas, such as left anterior IFG (Friederici, ; Kwok et al, , ), angular gyrus (AG) (Hartwigsen et al, ), and/or the left posterior portion of superior and middle temporal gyrus (pSTG/pMTG) (Kwok et al, ). We also expected to see differences in hemispheric lateralisation, with a stronger contribution of the right hemisphere to intonation processing and a left‐lateralised activity pattern for tone processing (Gandour, Dzemidzic, et al, ; Gandour, Wong, et al, ; Gandour et al, ; van Lancker, ).…”

Right inferior frontal gyrus: An integrative hub in tonal bilinguals

“…Moreover, a greater density in gray and white matter of right anterior temporal lobe and left insula were found in Chinese speakers relative to nontonal multilinguals suggesting that the anterior temporal lobe and insula play an important role in linking the pitch of words to their meaning for a tonal language (Crinion et al, ). However, a recent meta‐analysis failed to find hemispheric specialization in processing lexical pitch of a tonal language even though it showed that right anatomical regions were more recruited for tonal language processing (Kwok et al, ). To date, few studies have been done on tonal bilinguals where both languages share similar lexical features or on inherent long‐term configuration that is shaped by such two tonal languages.…”

Neural correlates and functional connectivity of lexical tone processing in reading

“…Bilateral inferior frontal gyri, insular, cingulate gyri and the precentral gyri were consistently active in lexical tone processing in speech (Chang et al, 2014;Gandour et al, 2000;Klein et al, 2001;Kwok et al, 2016Kwok et al, , 2017Liang & Du, 2018;Nan & Friederici, 2013;Wong et al, 2004Wong et al, , 2008. When participants were required to make lexical tone judgments in silent reading, they had to generate or retrieve auditory Stereotaxic coordinates (mm) are derived from the human brain atlas of Talairach and Tournoux (1998) and refer to the peak Z scores for each region (p < 0.001 at voxel level, p < 0.05 FWE-corrected at cluster-mass level) in non-parametric approach.…”

“…In the auditory domain, a large number of neuroimaging studies have revealed that lexical tone pro-cessing in speech is subserved by a bi-lateralized cortical network involving superior temporal regions, inferior prefrontal regions and the insula (Chang, Lee, Tzeng, & Kuo, 2014;Gandour et al, 2000;Hsieh, Gandour, Wong, & Hutchins, 2001;Klein, Zatorre, Milner, & Zhao, 2001;Kwok et al, 2016Kwok et al, , 2017Liang & Du, 2018;Liu, Peng, et al, 2006;Luo et al, 2006;Nan & Friederici, 2013;Ren, Yang, & Li, 2009;Schremm et al, 2018;Wong, Parsons, Martinez, & Diehl, 2004, Xi, Zhang, Shu, Zhang, & Li, 2010Yu, Wang, Li, & Li, 2014). Several studies have also illustrated left-lateralized connectivity network for lexical tone processing in speech (Ge et al, 2015;Xu, Wang, Chen, Fox, & Tan, 2015;Yang, Gates, Molenaar, & Li, 2015).…”