International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages With Emphasis on Tone Languages Beijing, China March 28-31, 2004

Auditory Preattentive Processing of Speech Prosody in Lexical Tone: A Functional Imaging with Low Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Topography (LORETA)

Wichian Sittiprapaporn, Chittin Chindaduangratn, Naiphinich Kotchabhakdi

Clinical and Research Electroneurophysiology Laboratory, Neuro-Behavioural Biology Center, Institute of Science and Technology for Research and Development, Mahidol University, Thailand

The present study investigated the preattentive perception of speech prosody changes in lexical tone as revealed by the low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). The mismatch negativity (MMN), elicited by consonant-vowel (CV) syllable change of both native and non-native speech sound contrasts in tonal languages was assessed by measuring the electric sources of MMN in both hemispheres. Our results suggest that the left hemisphere was predominant in the perception of native speech sounds, whereas the non-native speech sound was dominated by the right hemisphere, which may be explained by the specialization in processing the prosodic and emotional components of speech formed in this hemisphere.

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Bibliographic reference.  Sittiprapaporn, Wichian / Chindaduangratn, Chittin / Kotchabhakdi, Naiphinich (2004): "Auditory preattentive processing of speech prosody in lexical tone: a functional imaging with low resolution brain electromagnetic topography (LORETA)", In TAL-2004, 169-172.