Abstract
This study examined the neural substrates underlying the implementation of phonological rule in lexical tone by the Tone 3 sandhi phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. Tone 3 sandhi is traditionally described as the substitution of Tone 3 with Tone 2 when followed by another Tone 3 (33 →23) during speech production. Tone 3 sandhi enables the examination of tone processing in the phonological level with the least involvement of segments. Using the fMRI technique, we measured brain activations corresponding to the monosyllable and disyllable sequences of the four Chinese lexical tones, while manipulating the requirement on overt oral response. The application of Tone 3 sandhi to disyllable sequence of Tone 3 was confirmed by our behavioral results. Larger brain responses to overtly produced disyllable Tone 3 (33 > 11, 22, and 44) were found in right posterior IFG by both whole-brain and ROI analyses. We suggest that the right IFG was responsible for the processing of Tone 3 sandhi. Intense temporo-frontal interaction is needed in speech production for self-monitoring. The involvement of the right IFG in tone production might result from its interaction with the right auditory cortex, which is known to specialize in pitch. Future studies using tools with better temporal resolutions are needed to illuminate the dynamic interaction between the right inferior frontal regions and the left-lateralized language network in tone languages.
Highlights
Human languages could be divided into two broad categories according to whether they use pitch patterns to distinguish words or the grammatical forms of words
It is worth mentioning that the lowfalling contour of monosyllable Tone 3 in our results is different from the falling-rising pattern in standard Mandarin [40], but consistent with previous studies in Taiwanese Mandarin [50,51], which might reflect the influence from Taiwanese dialect [52]
The region of interest (ROI) analysis revealed a three-way interactions between number of syllable, overt oral response, and the Tone 3 effect in right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) triangular (η2 = .01, F(1,23) = 6.38, p = .020), right IFG opercular (η2 = .01, F(1,23) = 7.42, p = .012), and right putamen (η2 = .009, F(1,23) = 6.54, p = .010)
Summary
Human languages could be divided into two broad categories according to whether they use pitch patterns to distinguish words or the grammatical forms of words. Those who do are tone languages and pitch patterns they used are called lexical tones. In terms of phonological processing, language models built on these studies [4,5,6] mainly focus on segments, e.g. consonant and vowel, but ignore tone. Segment undoubtedly is more prevalent than tone It serves as important phonological unit in tone language as well as in non-tone languages. The incorporation of tone in models of language processing by investigating tone languages is indispensable
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