Word tones cueing morphosyntactic structure: Neuroanatomical substrates and activation time-course assessed by EEG and fMRI.
Previous studies distinguish between right hemisphere-dominant processing of prosodic/tonal information and left-hemispheric modulation of grammatical information as well as lexical tones. Swedish word accents offer a prime testing ground to better understand this division. Although similar to lexical tones, word accents are determined by words' morphosyntactic structure, which enables listeners to use the tone at the beginning of a word to predict its grammatical ending. We recorded electrophysiological and hemodynamic brain responses to words where stem tones matched or mismatched inflectional suffixes. Tones produced brain potential effects after 136 ms, correlating with subject variability in average BOLD in left primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus. Invalidly cued suffixes activated the left inferior parietal lobe, arguably reflecting increased processing cost of their meaning. Thus, interaction of word accent tones with grammatical morphology yielded a rapid neural response correlating in subject variability with activations in predominantly left-hemispheric brain areas.
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden. Electronic address: mikael.roll@ling.lu.se.
Mikael
M
Roll
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden.
Pelle
P
Söderström
Department of Medical Radiation Physics, Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Sweden.
Peter
P
Mannfolk
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Institute for Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Yury
Y
Shtyrov
Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden.
Mikael
M
Johansson
Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Sweden.
Danielle
D
van Westen
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden.
Merle
M
Horne
D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000098:blood supply / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D013548:Sweden; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
ERP; Grammar; Inferior frontal gyrus; Lexical tone; Morphology; Superior temporal gyrus; Word accent; fMRI