Abstract
Whole-head magnetoencephalography was employed in 40 normal subjects
to investigate whether the basic functional organization of the auditory
cortex varies with linguistic environment. Robust activations of
the bilateral supratemporal auditory cortices to 1-kHz pure tones,
maximum at about 100 ms after stimulus onset, were studied in Finnish
and German female and male subject groups with monolingual background.
Activations elicited by the tones were mutually indistinguishable
in German and Finnish women. In contrast, German men showed significantly
stronger auditory responses to pure tones in the left, language-dominant
hemisphere than Finnish men. We discuss the possibility that the
prominent left-hemisphere activation in German males reflects higher
frequency resolution required for distinguishing between German than
Finnish vowels and that the clear effect of native language in male
but not in female auditory cortex derives from more pronounced functional
lateralization in men. The present data suggest that the influence
of native language can extend to auditory cortical processing of
pure-tone stimuli with no linguistic content and that this effect
is conspicuous in the male brain.
- acoustic
- anatomy
- characteristics,visual
- cortex,auditory
- cortex:
- histology,auditory
- laterality,germany,humans,l1,language,magnetoencephalography,magnetoencephalography:
- mapping,female,finland,functional
- methods,male,reading,sex
- perception,audition,language,neuro,perception
- perception,brain
- physiology,auditory
- stimulation,adult,attention,auditory
- \&
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