Functional ear (a)symmetry in brainstem neural activity relevant to encoding of voice pitch: a precursor for hemispheric specialization?

ABSTRACT: Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and right ear of 15 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese using two synthetic speech stimuli that differ in linguistic status of tone. One represented a native lexical tone (Tone 2: T2); the other, T2', a nonnative variant in which the pitch contour was a mirror image of T2 with the same starting and ending frequencies. Two 40-ms portions of f(0) contours were selected in order to compare two regions (R1, early; R2 late) differing in pitch acceleration rat

SUBMITTER: Krishnan A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3193894 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature