Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 12, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21430-x
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Funding
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [U01NS117765]
- National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders [R01DC012379]
- William K. Bowes Foundation
- William and Susan Oberndorf Foundation
- Joan and Sanford Weill Foundation
- Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation
- Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project [2018SHZDZX01]
- Shanghai Shenkang Hospital Development Center [SHDC12018114]
- Shanghai Rising-Star Program [19QA1401700]
- Shanghai Young Talents Program [2017YQ014]
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Different languages use different vocal sounds to convey meaning, with some variations in pitch processing between tonal and non-tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese and English. However, there is a shared cortical auditory feature processing mechanism that is language-general, but also shows some language specificity at the population level.
Languages can use a common repertoire of vocal sounds to signify distinct meanings. In tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, pitch contours of syllables distinguish one word from another, whereas in non-tonal languages, such as English, pitch is used to convey intonation. The neural computations underlying language specialization in speech perception are unknown. Here, we use a cross-linguistic approach to address this. Native Mandarin- and English- speaking participants each listened to both Mandarin and English speech, while neural activity was directly recorded from the non-primary auditory cortex. Both groups show language-general coding of speaker-invariant pitch at the single electrode level. At the electrode population level, we find language-specific distribution of cortical tuning parameters in Mandarin speakers only, with enhanced sensitivity to Mandarin tone categories. Our results show that speech perception relies upon a shared cortical auditory feature processing mechanism, which may be tuned to the statistics of a given language. Different languages rely on different vocal sounds to convey meaning. Here the authors show that language-general coding of pitch occurs in the non-primary auditory cortex for both tonal (Mandarin Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages, with some language specificity on the population level.
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