The researchers found that learning Chinese makes both hemispheres of the brain work.
Traditionally, the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for speech recognition. However, new research by scientists at Peking University and their colleagues in Hong Kong found that this is not true for all languages. And if, for example, when recognizing English speech, the brain really uses only the left hemisphere, then recognizing Chinese requires activity from the right hemisphere. The fact is that classical Chinese (Mandarin) belongs to the so-called tone languages. The pitch of the sound in them is universally used to distinguish the meaning of words.
In their experiments, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brain activity of volunteers who listened to speech in Chinese or English (which in each case were native to them). As it turned out, the English-speaking study participants activated three specific areas of the left hemisphere of the brain responsible for speech recognition – the inferior frontal gyrus, the anterior superior temporal gyrus and the posterior middle temporal sulcus. The same areas also activated in the Chinese-speaking participants. However, in addition to this, they also recorded activity in the superior temporal gyrus of the right hemisphere (1). This area was previously associated by scientists with the perception of music and, in particular, pitch.
“Pitch is critical to the perception of music, but it is equally important for understanding the meaning of tone languages,” commented one of his co-authors, University of Hong Kong scholar Gang Peng, to the portal. . “Based on our results, we can assume that the right hemisphere is involved in speech recognition in all other tone languages as well.” Tonal, in addition to Chinese, include, for example, Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai and a number of other languages, mainly Asian.
These studies are important for a general understanding of the activity of the brain and the interaction of the hemispheres in speech processing. On a practical level, they can be useful to neurosurgeons when performing operations on the brain. Well, besides, they partly explain why “Chinese literacy” is given with great difficulty to people who are used to speaking languages in which the pitch of the sound is in no way connected with the meaning, for example, in Russian or English. For this reason, say, Mark Zuckerberg or the British Prince William, studying Mandarin Chinese, have to literally use their heads more during their lessons – using not one, but both hemispheres at once.
1.