"More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"

[samuels at anthro.umass.edu]

I'm wondering what to make of the left brain/right brain = language/music
equation in these ideas about English vs. Mandarin or Japanese. The BBC article
posted by Kerim says that Mandarin speakers use both hemispheres of their
brains because Mandarin is a tonal language, as if intonation is unimportant in
the processing of English. Is English intonation processed in the left brain
because it's *not* semantic? If the left brain is for language processing, why
are tones so closely linked to the lexical reference processed in the right
brain?

David

Quoting Laura Miller <lmille2 at wpo.it.luc.edu>:

> Yes, poor Roy Miller has been criticized for openly expressing his anger, but
> he was not alone in his desire to counter the many bizarre folk theories
> about the Japanese language that were (and still are!) so widely popular,
> although he went about it with a rather raw and seething tone that we are
> taught not to use in academic writing. Harumi Befu and Peter Dale have also
> documented the popular media consumption of this form of  "theorizing the
> Japanese" (nihonjinron), and much of it is indeed quite racist.
> Related to his sentiment that :
> "he found it always disconcerted people who couldn't accept the idea that
> foreigners could
> speak Japanese; it just shouldn't have been possible, given what the popular
> conceptions were,"
> I once wrote an article about the fashionableness of Japanese-speaking
> foreigners on TV, which on the face of it would seem to contradict this
> notion, but which in fact serves to buttress it:
> "Crossing ethnolinguistic boundaries: A preliminary look at the gaijin
> tarento in Japan."
> In Asian Popular Culture, edited by John Lent, Westview Press, New York,
> 162-173,1995.
>
>
>
> >>> "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu> 07/01/03 09:54 AM
> >>>
> Thanks Laura for clearing this up; I only knew about it from Miller's
> writing, and he characterized it as racist; he was somebody who had spent
> a lifetime studying Japanese, spoke it fluently (like a native, I was told
> by some native speakers) but loathed all the cottage industry stuff that
> was so popular in the Japanese popular press, and was out to demolish it
> wherever possible.  Because he spoke Japanese so well he found it always
> disconcerted people who couldn't accept the idea that foreigners could
> speak Japanese; it just shouldn't have been possible, given what the
> popular conceptions were.
>
> HS
>
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Laura Miller wrote:
>
> > The study Hal refers to was from a book by Tadanobu Tsunoda, entitled
> > "Nihonjin no no: No no hataraki to tozai no bunka" (1978), it was later
> > translated and published as "The Japanese Brain, Uniqueness and
> > Universality" (Translated by Yoshinori Oiwa, Tokyo, Japan: Taishukan
> > Publishing Company, 1985). Tsunoda is an otolaryngologist who made up an
> > odd "tapping method" to determine which hemisphere of the brain
> > processes sounds and language. He claimed that Japanese process some
> > sounds, especially music and natural sounds such as insect chips,
> > differently than Westerners, thereby making them more in tune with
> > nature. He doesn't claim that the Japanese brain is superior, or that
> > the difference is genetic, just that it develops in a different way
> > because of the "unique"  nature of the Japanese language. The book was
> > awful science, but the Japanese reading public loved it! It made the
> > bestseller list and went through several reprintings. Tsunoda and his
> > perplexing brain testing apparatus are featured in a short vignette in
> > the film Sukiyaki & Chips: The Japanese Sounds of Music.
> >
> >
> > >>> "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu> 07/01/03 08:07 AM
> >>>
> > This business reminds me of claims made years ago, and reported by Roy
> > Andrew Miller in his book "Japan's Modern Myth: the Language and Beyond"
> > that Japanese also supposedly used different parts of the brain, and
> > therefore was cognitively different from every other language on earth.
> > Miller tried to show that this was part of Japanese agendas to show some
> > kind of deep cultural superiority of the Japanese; at least it was
> > 'racist' (covertly maybe).  The "research" done in Japan even showed that
> > Japanese Americans did not use the same parts of their brains as did
> > Japanese speaking Japanese, etc. etc.  Supposedly this also had to do with
> > the difference in writing, and it explained (as Peter points out for
> > Chinese) why the Japanese have such difficulty learning other languages.
> >
> > Hal Schiffman
> >
> > On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Patrick, Peter L wrote:
> >
> > > i haven't seen more than the news items, which are obviously badly
> reported
> > > by Reuters, the BBC and the Guardian (eg English speakers use "half their
> minds")--
> > > those supposedly intellectually-superior organs of the British press...
> > > (not that i can see much evidence for that, as a regular reader!)
> > >
> > > Eg, the inference that Mandarin is "harder to learn" than English appears
> to derive
> > > from an off-the-cuff remark the researcher made about adult SLA of
> Chinese by
> > > English speakers -- not from any research reported. And the "long-held
> theories"
> > > that this "overturns" are not described or identified.
> > >
> > > While it's nice when research confirm things one suspects, there doesn't
> > > appear to be anything else new here -- certainly not the speculation that
> lexical
> > > tone involves music-like properties -- you have to wonder what it is
> that
> > > made the researchers (psychologists, apparently) "very surprised"!
> > >
> > > Rudi's point is well-taken. The BBC online illustrated this with a
> picture of a
> > > repressive-looking Chinese soldier making a "Stop!" gesture in Tiananmen
> Square.
> > > What picture would have been used if it WERE about Yoruba speakers? Or,
> god forbid,
> > > about Deaf native signers? (though that research would be interesting to
> hear about...)
> > >
> > > 	-p-
> > > Peter L Patrick
> > > Dept of Language and Linguistics
> > > University of Essex
> > > patrickp at essex.ac.uk
> > >
> > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Gaudio, Rudolf [mailto:Rudolf.Gaudio at purchase.edu]
> > > > Sent: 30 June 2003 22:33
> > > > To: 'linganth at cc.rochester.edu '
> > > > Subject: "More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English
> > > > http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030630/hl_
> > > > nm/brain_langu
> > > > age_dc_2
> > > >
> > > > The link above is to a news story about some recently published
> > > > neurolinguistic research that found that Mandarin-speaking
> > > > listeners used
> > > > both sides of their brains to perceive & interpret Mandarin
> > > > speech, whereas
> > > > English speakers used only the left side to process English
> > > > speech.  This
> > > > has apparently set off a lot of buzz about how Mandarin (or
> > > > "Chinese") is
> > > > harder to learn than English is.
> > > >
> > > > Is anyone familiar with this research?  I can't help but
> > > > wonder whether, if
> > > > similar results were obtained in a study comparing, say,
> > > > Yoruba and English
> > > > speakers, the media buzz would be the same.
> > > >
> > > > Rudi
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
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