Tone-grammar association within words: Concurrent ERP and fMRI show rapid neural pre-activation and involvement of left inferior frontal gyrus in pseudoword processing

Abstract

Using a concurrent ERP/fMRI paradigm, we investigated how listeners take advantage of morphologically relevant tonal information at the beginning of words to predict and pre-activate likely word endings. More predictive, low tone word stems gave rise to a 'pre-activation negativity' (PrAN) in the ERPs, a brain potential which has previously been found to increase along with the degree of predictive certainty as regards how a word is going to end. It is suggested that more predictive, low tone stems lead to rapid access to word endings with processing subserved by the left primary auditory cortex as well as the supramarginal gyrus, while high tone stems - which are less predictive - decrease predictive certainty, leading to increased competition between activated word endings, which needs to be resolved by the left inferior frontal gyrus.

What Makes Lexical Tone Special: A Reverse Accessing Model for Tonal Speech Perception

“…The RAM is compatible with the neural imaging evidence suggesting a multi-level cortical network for tone processing (Roll et al, 2015;Shuai and Malins, 2016;Si et al, 2017;Soderstrom et al, 2017;Schremm et al, 2018) and offers a mechanism for the suggested network dynamics to unfold. The top-down reactivation of the phonological network provides a simple mechanism for top-down factors to interact with bottom-up processing (Shuai and Gong, 2014).…”

“…Accumulating evidence suggests that perception of tone in speech involves a complicated, multi-level cortical network (Shuai and Gong, 2014;Roll et al, 2015;Si et al, 2017;Soderstrom et al, 2017;Schremm et al, 2018). For example, event-related potential (ERP) studies (Shuai and Gong, 2014) indicate temporally overlapping but spatially separate top-down, linguistic processing and bottom-up, auditory processing of lexical tones with linguistic processing lateralized toward the left hemisphere and auditory processing toward the right hemisphere.…”

“…Cortical surface recordings (Si et al, 2017) further distinguished a distributed cooperative network consisting of bilateral temporal and frontal motor areas in native Chinese speakers passively listening to tones in an oddball paradigm, with strong temporal-on-motor influence in the right hemisphere. As an interesting comparison, concurrent fMRI and EEG recordings with native speakers of Swedish, in which tones on word stems are used to predict suffixes, revealed that in addition to left primary auditory cortex and superior temporal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus was also activated during tone perception and correlated to both early and later electrical responses (Roll et al, 2015;Soderstrom et al, 2017). The hierarchical processing structure of Swedish tone was further supported by cortical thickness measures, which correlated to tone perception in real words in left planum temporale and to tone processing in pseudo words in left inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis (Schremm et al, 2018).…”

Differentiation between young adult Internet addicts, smokers, and healthy controls by the interaction between impulsivity and temporal lobe thickness

“…As previous studies (Ding et al, 2014;Dong, Huang, & Du, 2012;Feng et al, 2013) have claimed, temporal areas are involved in audio-visual processinga function that is frequently activated during screen media activity like computer and Internet use. It has been suggested that long-term hyperactivity in such regions could lead to impaired auditoryvisual abilities (Ding et al, 2014), language-processing impairment (Söderström, Horne, Mannfolk, van Westen, & Roll, 2017), and learning problems (Cone-Wesson, 2005). The negative relationship between impulsivity and the thickness of the left POrb observed in the whole sample could lend further support to the possible involvement of language processing.…”

Reading across writing systems: A meta-analysis of the neural correlates for first and second language reading

“…However, this contrasting pattern was only observed in PP bilinguals. The left insula plays a key role in articulation, speech production, or motor processing (Chang, Yarkoni, Khaw & Sanfey, 2012, Carota, Kriegeskorte, Nili & Pulvermüller, 2017, Söderström, Horne, Mannfolk, van Westen & Roll, 2017). More reliance on this region during reading in L2 in PP bilinguals might be ascribed to the high similarity of writing systems.…”