Tone Perception: Hemispheric Lateralization and Categorical perception

In this presentation, our main focus is on hemispheric lateralization (HL) and categorical perception (CP, Liberman, et al.1957), especially in tone perception.
 
We will give an introduction to the structure of tonal syllables, with the demos showing the relationship between fundamental frequency (the physical properties) and tone categories (linguistic properties), and how to construct experimental stimuli. From our studies of speech production, some physical properties of tones will be shown through experimental results (Peng, 2006; Wong, 2006).

Starting from speech perception part, we will provide the neuroanatomical basis of HL and CP, from the ascending auditory pathways. Then we will follow by several fMRI studies on HL and CP.(Gandour, et al., 2002, Jamison, et al., 2006, Liebenthal, et al., 2005) These results confirm the findings of behavioral study on HL and CP, and provide hints for carrying on further fMRI experiments.

The last two parts are our behavioral study results on HL and CP. We will show dichotic listening and context effect on categorical perception on Cantonese tones. In HL part, earlier dichotic listening experiments on Thai (Van Lancker & Fromkin, 1973) and Mandarin (Wang, 2001) will be compared with the experiment on Cantonese. In CP part, an earlier CP experiment (Francis, 2003) on Cantonese tone is reviewed, which will be compared with our study of CP with context effect (Zheng et al. 2006). We also observed context direction effect in tone perception. The context and context direction effects have also been studied with the comparison between speech and nonspeech by native Cantonese speaker and the comparison between native speakers and Mandarin speakers with the same stimuli. At the end we will discuss further possible fMRI experiments on HL and CP.

References:

Blumstein, S. E., Myers, E. B., et al. 2005. The perception of Voice Onset Time: an fMRI investigation of phonetic category structure. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17(9): 1353-1366.
Francis, A. L., Ciocca, V., et al. 2003. On the (non)categorical perception of lexical tones. Perception & Psychophysics 65(7): 1029-1044.
Gandour, J., Wong, D., et al. 2002. A cross-linguistic fMRI study of spectral and temporal cues underlying phonological processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14(7): 1076-1087.
Jamison, H. L., Watkins, K. E., et al. 2006. Hemispheric specialization for processing auditory nonspeech stimuli. Cerebral Cortex 16(9): 1266-1275.
Liberman, A. M., Harris, K. S., et al. 1957. The eiscrimination of speech sounds within and across phoneme boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology 54(5): 358-368.
Liebenthal, E., Binder, J. R., et al. 2005. Neural substrates of phonemic perception. Cerebral Cortex 15(10): 1621-1631.
Peng, G. 2006. Temporal and tonal aspects of Chinese syllables: A corpus-based comparative study of Mandarin and Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 34(1): 134-154.
Van Lancker, D., Fromkin, V. 1973. Hemispheric specialization for pitch and tone: Evidence from Thai. Journal of Phonetics 1: 101–109.
Wang, Y. 2001. Dichotic Perception of Mandarin Tones by Chinese and American Listeners. Brain and Language 78: 332–348.
Wong, Y. 2006. Contextual Tonal Variations and Pitch Targets in Cantonese. 3rd International Conference on Speech prosody, Dresden, Germany.
Zheng, H., Peng, G., et al. 2006. Perception of Cantonese level tones influenced by context position. 3rd International Conference on Speech prosody, Dresden, Germany.