Hemispheric processing of pitch accent in Japanese by native and non‐native listeners.

Abstract

It is well established that language processing is left hemisphere dominant. Previous findings, however, indicate that lateralization of different levels of linguistic prosody varies with their functional load as well as listeners' linguistic experience. This study explored the hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent by native and non‐native listeners differing in experience with pitch, including 16 native Japanese participants, 16 Mandarin Chinese participants whose native language has linguistic tonal contrasts, and 16 English participants with no tone or pitch accent background. Pitch accent pairs were dichotically presented and the listeners were asked to identify which pitch accent pattern they heard in each ear. Preliminary results showed that for all the three groups, the percentage of errors for the left ear and that for the right ear were comparable, indicating no hemispheric dominance. The Japanese group did not reveal left hemisphere dominance, as previously found for linguistic tone processing by native listeners. The performance of Mandarin group infers that tone language background did not significantly affect the lateralization of pitch accent. These findings are discussed in terms of how linguistic function differentially influences the hemispheric specialization of different domains of prosodic processing by native and non‐native listeners. [Work supported by the NSERC.]