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.
Highlights
The functional anatomy of speech perception has been intensively investigated for over a century in the neuropsychology literature, and more recently in the neuroimaging literature
While it is known that the processing of non-linguistic pitches such as music and melodies are associated with right hemispheric regions (e.g., Zatorre et al, 1992, 1994), researchers have started to ask whether the neural specialization for linguistic pitch patterns would be different from that of non-linguistic pitch patterns
The domain-specific model assumes lateralization depends on the function of pitch patterns: when tones are processed as acoustic units their processing is right lateralized, but when they are processed as phonological units their processing is left lateralized (Whalen and Liberman, 1987; Liberman and Whalen, 2000)
Summary
The functional anatomy of speech perception has been intensively investigated for over a century in the neuropsychology literature, and more recently in the neuroimaging literature. While it is known that the processing of non-linguistic pitches such as music and melodies are associated with right hemispheric regions (e.g., Zatorre et al, 1992, 1994), researchers have started to ask whether the neural specialization for linguistic pitch patterns (i.e., lexical tones) would be different from that of non-linguistic pitch patterns. The cue-specific model (or the acoustic hypothesis) assumes that pitch patterns are processed according to their acoustic structures, regardless of their functions, and are lateralized only to the right hemisphere (Van Lancker, 1980; Zatorre and Belin, 2001)
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