Abstract
Neural representation of pitch is influenced by lifelong experiences
with music and language at both cortical and subcortical levels of
processing. The aim of this article is to determine whether neural
plasticity for pitch representation at the level of the brainstem
is dependent upon specific dimensions of pitch contours that commonly
occur as part of a native listener's language experience. Brainstem
frequency following responses (FFRs) were recorded from Chinese and
English participants in response to four Mandarin tonal contours
presented in a nonspeech context in the form of iterated rippled
noise. Pitch strength (whole contour, 250 msec; 40-msec segments)
and pitch-tracking accuracy (whole contour) were extracted from the
FFRs using autocorrelation algorithms. Narrow band spectrograms were
used to extract spectral information. Results showed that the Chinese
group exhibits smoother pitch tracking than the English group in
three out of the four tones. Moreover, cross-language comparisons
of pitch strength of 40-msec segments revealed that the Chinese group
exhibits more robust pitch representation of those segments containing
rapidly changing pitch movements across all four tones. FFR spectral
data were complementary showing that the Chinese group exhibits stronger
representation of multiple pitch-relevant harmonics relative to the
English group across all four tones. These findings support the view
that at early preattentive stages of subcortical processing, neural
mechanisms underlying pitch representation are shaped by particular
dimensions of the auditory stream rather than speech per se. Adopting
a temporal correlation analysis scheme for pitch encoding, we propose
that long-term experience sharpens the tuning characteristics of
neurons along the pitch axis with enhanced sensitivity to linguistically
relevant variations in pitch.
- acoustic
- adult,language,perception,pitch,speech,tone
- analysis,electroencephalography,english,evoked
- analysis,speech,time
- factors,young
- methods,adult,analysis
- of
- perception,pitch
- perception:
- physiolog,brain
- physiology,discriminant
- physiology,psycholinguistics,sound,sound
- potentials,female,humans,linguistics,male,mandarin,phonetics,pitch
- spectrography,spectrum
- stem,brain
- stem:
- stimulation,acoustic
- stimulation:
- variance,auditory,brain
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