Dissociation in the neural basis underlying Chinese tone and vowel production

Li Liu,Danling Peng,Guosheng Ding,Zhen Jin,Lei Zhang,Ke Li,Chuansheng Chen

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.07.046

Li Liu, Danling Peng + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.07.046

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Abstract

Neuropsychologists have debated over whether the processing of segmental and suprasegmental units involves different neural mechanisms. Focusing on the production of Chinese lexical tones (suprasegmental units) and vowels (segmental units), this study used the adaptation paradigm to investigate a possible neural dissociation for tone and vowel production. Ten native Chinese speakers were asked to name Chinese characters and pinyin (Romanized phonetic system for Chinese language) that varied in terms of tones and vowels. fMRI results showed significant differences in the right inferior frontal gyrus between tone and vowel production (more activation for tones than for vowels). Brain asymmetry analysis further showed that tone production was less left-lateralized than vowel production, although both showed left-hemisphere dominance.

Highlights

In linguistics, each syllable is deemed to include two phonological units: a segmental unit such as a vowel and a consonant and a prosodic frame unit such as pitch or tone or stress
Common examples of ma1 are ‘‘mother’’ and ‘‘wipe.’’ Four different characters are pronounced as ma2, with one of them having at least five meanings including ‘‘numb,’’ ‘‘hemp,’’ and ‘‘rough.’’ Ma3 could be any of six different characters with meanings such as ‘‘horse,’’ ‘‘units,’’ and ‘‘ant.’’ ma4 has a common character (‘‘scold’’) and three less common uses
For the pinyin-naming tasks, the asymmetry indexes (AIs) in the five brain regions of interest (ROIs) were 0.60, 0.68, 0.33, 0.40, and 0.86 for the tone-change condition, and 0.76, 0.66, 0.43, 0.50 and 0.87, respectively, for the vowel-change condition. These results suggest that brain activation induced by both pinyin tones and vowels was leftlateralized

Summary

Introduction

Each syllable is deemed to include two phonological units: a segmental unit such as a vowel and a consonant and a prosodic frame (or suprasegmental) unit such as pitch or tone or stress. Many behavioral studies (Ferrand and Segui, 1998; Meijer, 1996; Sevald et al, 1995), mostly based on European languages, have found evidence for separate storage and processing systems for the segmental and suprasegmental units. Based on such evidence, psycholinguistic phonological encoding models (Dell, 1988; Levelt, 1992; Levelt et al, 1999) have postulated that representations of the segmental and suprasegmental units of a syllable can, to a certain extent, be stored. Tones are extremely important in distinguishing among these different sets of words Because of their lexical significance, tones have sometimes been regarded by linguists to be phonemic and to act like segmental units. If tones act like segmental units, neural mechanisms involved in the processing of tones may be the same as those for the processing of other segmental units such as vowels

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