title: Sustained Responses as Neurophysiological Parameter for the Assessment of Processing of Tonal Languages
creator: Fan, Christina Siu-Dschu
subject: ddc-400
subject: 400 Linguistics
subject: ddc-530
subject: 530 Physics
subject: ddc-610
subject: 610 Medical sciences Medicine
description: To understand speech processing is one of the ultimate goals of investigations of sound processing  in the auditory cortex. Chinese tones are the perfect object for this kind of investigation  because they are very short but still contain complex linguistic information. In tonal languages  such as Mandarin Chinese, pitch contours discriminate lexical meaning at a systematic level,  which is not the case in non-tonal languages such as German. It is still unclear how such differences  in phonological systems are reflected at the cortical level. Using magnetoencephalography  I investigated the sustained field (SF) evoked in native Chinese and native German speakers.  Natural speech stimuli evoked significantly larger SF for the Chinese than for the German  group, whereas for a musical tone there was no significant difference between both group. The  SF for Chinese subjects were larger when evoked by meaningful syllables as compared to meaningless  ones, but there was no significant difference in the SF evoked when vowels were part  of the Chinese phonological system or not. These findings suggest that the SF generated in  the auditory cortex represents a relevant neurophysiological parameter for the assessment of  language-related processes.
publisher: University of Heidelberg
date: 2012-12-07
type: Dissertation
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/14212/1/Fan_2012%20Dissertation.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00014212
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-142123
identifier:   Fan, Christina Siu-Dschu  (2012) Sustained Responses as Neurophysiological Parameter for the Assessment of Processing of Tonal Languages.  [Dissertation]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/14212/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng