Functional Lateralization of Linguistic Tones: Acoustic Evidence from Norwegian

Abstract

A group of five male right-hemisphere-damaged and five male left-hemisphere-damaged aphasics were recorded repeating a set of three phonemic tone-contrasted minimal pairs in Norwegian. A narrow-band spectrographic analysis revealed more impaired tone production (less phono-acoustic differentiation between phonemic pairs, and longer maximal productions) on the part of the left-hemisphere group than the right-hemisphere group, although the productions of the right-hemisphere group also seemed to be perturbed. A perceptual test of the patients' recorded productions by a native speaker revealed more lexical errors due to poor tone contrasts on the part of the left-hemisphere-damaged group. These results are discussed and compared to previous studies of linguistic tones in the neurological literature.

Keywords

Cerebral lateralization tones neurolinguistics

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alajouanine, T. , Cathala, H.-P. , Metellus, J. , Siksou, Alleton V. , Cheng, F. , DE Turckheim C. and Chang, M.-C. , (1973). La problématique de l'aphasie dans les langues à écriture non-alphabetique: A propos d'un cas chez un Chinois. Revue Neuropsychologie, 128, 229–243.

Baudoin, S., (1982). Latéralisation hémispherique du traitement des tons en langue chinoise (pekinois). Ph.D. dissertation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Behrens, S. , (1985). The perception of stress and lateralization of prosody. Brain and Language, 26, 332–348.

Cooper, W. , Soares, C , Nicol, J. , Michelow D. and Goloski, S. , (1984). Clausal intonation after unilateral brain damage. Language and Speech, 27, 17–24.

Fintoft, K. , (1970). Acoustic Analysis and Perception of Tonemes in Some Norwegian Dialects. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Gandour, J. and Dardarananda, R. , (1983). Identification of tonal contrasts in Thai aphasic patients. Brain and Language, 18, 98–114.

Hécaen, H. , Mazaras, G. , Ramier, A. , Goldblum M.-C. and Merienne, L. , (1971). Aphasie croisée chez un sujet droitier bilingue (vietnamien-français). Revue Neurologique, 124, 319–323.

Heilman, K. , Bowers, D. , Speedie L. and Branch Coslett, H. , (1984). Comprehension of affective and non-affective prosody. Neurology, 34, 917–921.

Hughes, C , Chan, J. and Su, S. , (1983). Aprosodia in Chinese patients with right cerebral hemisphere lesions. Archives of Neurology, 40, 732–736.

10.

Jakobson, R. , (1968). Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (Trans.). The Hague: Mouton. (original work published 1942.)

11.

Lieberman, P. , (1977). Speech Physiology and Acoustic Phonetics. New York: Macmillan.

12.

Monrad-Krohn, G. , (1947). Dysprosody or altered melody of language. Brain, 70, 405–415.

13.

Naeser, M. and Chan, S. , (1980). Case study of a Chinese aphasic with the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Exam. Neuropsychologia, 18, 389–410.

14.

Packard, J. , (1986). Tone production deficits in non-fluent aphasic Chinese speech. Brain and Language, 29, 212–223.

15.

Ross, E. , (1981). The Aprosodias: l-'unctional-anatomic organization of the affective components of language in the right hemisphere. Archives of Neurology, 38, 561–569.

16.

Shapiro, B. and Danly, M. , (1985). The role of the right hemisphere in the control of speech prosody in propositional and affective contexts. Brain and Language, 25, 19–36.

17.

Van Lancker, D. and Fromkin, V. , (1978). Cerebral dominance for pitch contrasts in tone language speakers and in musically untrained and trained English speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 6, 19–23.

18.

Van Lancker, D., (1980). Cerebral lateralizaton of pitch cues in the linguistic signal. Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication, 13, 201–277.