PITCH PROCESSING IN THE HUMAN BRAIN IS INFLUENCED BY LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE

POSITRON emission tomography (PET) was used in a cross-linguistic stud y to compare pitch processing in native speakers of English, a nontone language, with those of Thai, a tone language. When discriminating pi tch patterns in Thai words, only the Thai subjects showed activation i n the left frontal operculum. Activation of this region near the class ically defined Broca's area suggests that the brain recognizes functio nal properties, rather than simply acoustic properties, of complex aud itory cues in accessing language-specific mechanisms in pitch percepti on. (C) 1998 Rapid Science Ltd.