Lateralization of tonal and intonational pitch processing: An MEG study

Abstract

An MEG experiment was carried out in order to compare the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts, based on the tonal dialect of Roermond (the Netherlands). A set of words with identical phoneme sequences but distinct pitch contours, which represented different lexical meanings or discourse meanings (statement vs. question), were presented to native speakers as well as to a control group of speakers of Standard Dutch, a non-tone language. The stimuli were arranged in a mismatch paradigm, under three experimental conditions: in the first condition (lexical), the pitch contour differences between standard and deviant stimuli reflected differences between lexical meanings; in the second condition (intonational), the stimuli differed in their discourse meaning; in the third condition (combined), they differed both in their lexical and discourse meaning. In all three conditions, native as well as non-native responses showed a clear MMNm (magnetic mismatch negativity) in a time window from 150 to 250 ms after the divergence point of standard and deviant pitch contours. In the lexical condition, a stronger response was found over the left temporal cortex of native as well as non-native speakers. In the intonational condition, the same activation pattern was observed in the control group, but not in the group of native speakers, who showed a right-hemisphere dominance instead. Finally, in the combined (lexical and intonational) condition, brain reactions appeared to represent the summation of the patterns found in the other two conditions. In sum, the lateralization of pitch processing is condition-dependent in the native group only, which suggests that language experience determines how processes should be distributed over both temporal cortices, according to the functions available in the grammar.

Perception of intonation in Mandarin Chinese

“…That is, tone and intonation interact at the phonological and linguistic levels. These results demonstrate that intonation in Chinese is not only realized at the level of global or semiglobal features, as often claimed in the literature (Fournier et al, 2010;Liang and van Heuven, 2007;Vaissiere, 2005). Question intonation has a local mechanism that is sensitive to the identity of tones, suggesting that a tone-dependent intonation model is needed.…”

Specific Neural Traces for Intonational Discourse Categories as Revealed by Human-evoked Potentials

“…Leitman et al (2009) andDoherty et al (2004) argued that the large MMN elicited only by interrogative stimuli (and not by the declarative stimuli) "may underlie the ability of questions to automatically capture attention even when the preceding declarative information has been ignored" (Leitman et al, 2009, p. 289). Fournier et al (2010) argued that the recognition of discourse meanings by means of intonation was not necessarily clear by looking at the human brain.…”

“…Following Näätänen (2001), the MMN reflects the early access to stored linguistic representations and indicates the match or mismatch between a stimulus and its corresponding symbolic memory trace in the brain. According to Pulvermüller and Shtyrov (2006), the MMN for language stimuli is composed of at least two parts: a part that reflects the automatic detection of a sound change and a part that reflects the activation of cortical cell assemblies forming the long-term memory traces for learned cognitive representations (see Fournier, Gussenhoven, Jensen, & Hagoort, 2010, for a review of the studies on the lateralization of tonal and intonational pitch processing).…”

“…The authors found an increased BOLD activity for rising declarative questions over the falling counterparts, and they argued that the differences may reflect the presence of a subtle aspect of illocutionary force (conduciveness) in the utterances with rising intonational contours. Fournier et al (2010) examined the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts by speakers of an intonational language (STD Dutch) and of a tonal dialectal variety of Dutch (Roermond Dutch). They assumed that the brain responses to the stimuli would depend on the subjectsʼ language experience, but no group differences were found.…”

Neural correlates of the perception of contrastive prosodic focus in French: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

“…Left hemispheric dominance was only found when the sound was placed in word context. Furthermore, hemispheric asymmetry has been observed for the processing of the same speech signal depending on the language experience of the listener [standard Dutch vs. tonal dialect of Roermond: Fournier et al, ; Chinese vs. English: Gandour et al, ; Chinese vs. Thai: Xu et al, ].…”