Researchers reveal that local neural populations in the brain's bilateral laryngeal motor cortex are key in controlling the pitch dynamics in Mandarin lexical tones, overturning the idea of single-tone category encoding.
By Dr. Sushama R. Chaphalkar, PhD.Nov 2 2023Reviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc. In a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications, using intracranial recordings, researchers investigated the neural basis of lexical tone production in native Mandarin speakers.
Background To distinguish between words in a tonal language, a speaker needs to modulate the voice pitch to form specific trajectories called "lexical tones." Precise control of the larynx is essential to produce and modulate the voice pitch via three functions: voicing, rising, and lowering.
About the study The study included eight participants undergoing awake language mapping as a part of their brain tumor surgery. While the participants spoke Mandarin syllables in four different tones, the neural activity was recorded using high-density electrode grids placed in the sensorimotor cortex . The experimental tasks included tone production as well as sentence production, where 20 phonetically balanced Mandarin sentences were read out by the participants from a screen prompt.
Results and discussion As per the study, neural coding of dynamic vocal pitch control is brought about by distributed neural populations in the ventral as well as dorsal LMC. During the analysis, no evidence of electrode sites tuned to an individual tone category was found. Instead, a distributed type of neural coding in bilateral LMC was shown to underlie the cortical control of lexical tone generation.
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