"More Brain Power Needed for YORUBA Than English" ?

[Gaudio, Rudolf]

I've been wondering the same thing, David.  Unsurprisingly, the media
stories conflate tone & intonation.

Re. my hypothetical query about how the media would spin the results of a
Yoruba vs. English comparison:  Since Yoruba, like many other West African
languages, has a complex tonal structure, my guess is that, if Yoruba
speakers were found to use both sides of their brains to process their
language, the media would not interpret this in terms of Yoruba speakers'
"brain power" or the relative difficulty of Yoruba vs. English for
second-language learners.  Of course, this assumes that the media would even
cover such a story, and that such a study would be undertaken to begin
with--which, as Kerim points out, is doubtful.

Rudi

> ----------
> From: 	samuels at anthro.umass.edu
> Sent: 	Tuesday, July 1, 2003 12:50 PM
> To: 	Laura Miller
> Cc: 	haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu; linganth at cc.rochester.edu;
> patrickp at essex.ac.uk; Rudolf.Gaudio at purchase.edu
> Subject: 	RE: "More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"
>
> 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
>