[lg policy] Tonal Languages Use Both Sides of the Brain

[Harold Schiffman]

Tonal Languages Use Both Sides of the Brain
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[image: 523016973]
<http://languagemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/523016973.jpg>Language
learning and processing is usually dominated by the left side of the brain,
which is adept at tasks that involve logic and analytical thinking.
However, in a recent study
<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/02/18/1416000112> that mapped brain
information flow while processing intelligible speech in English and
Mandarin Chinese, it was found that in Chinese speech comprehension there
are neural dynamics between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Speakers of both English and Mandarin Chinese both showed brain activity in
the brain’s left hemisphere. However, Mandarin speakers also showed brain
activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, a region important for
processing music through registering different pitches and tones. English
speakers do use tones to communicate emotional information, but not to
convey anything about the meaning of a word. In a tonal language like
Mandarin, the same basic sounds can refer to vastly different meanings
depending on its accompanying tone.

Although the implications of whether or not the world looks different in
different languages are still unclear, the study supports one emerging
theory – connectionism – which proposes that knowledge is distributed
across different areas of the brain. Gang Peng, deputy director of the
Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong and a co-author of the recent study told Quartz,
“Pitch processing is crucial for music, but also crucial for tone
processing of a tone language. Based on our current results, it is
reasonable to hypothesize that all tone languages use both hemispheres.”

http://languagemagazine.com/?p=123206




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