ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2017
A Meta-Analytic Study of the Neural Systems for Auditory Processing of Lexical Tones.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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17 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Age of Language Acquisition Affects Topology of Brain White Matter Network: A Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Early but discontinued exposure to a language exerts lasting effects on white matter architecture in the brain.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Speaking in Tones: The role of lexical tones in Chinese-speaking Primary Progressive Aphasia.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Preliminary study on the neural mechanisms of four tone recognition in deaf children using fMRI.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing the impact of musical proficiency on percussion note identification skills in undergraduate medical students: an analysis using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.BMC medical education · 2025Article
- Synthesizing intelligible utterances from EEG of imagined speech.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reproducibility of infant fNIRS studies: a meta-analytic approach.Neurophotonics · 2023Article
- Tonal and orthographic analysis in a Cantonese-speaking individual with nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia.Neurocase · 2022Article
- Increased Gray Matter Volume Induced by Chinese Language Acquisition in Adult Alphabetic Language Speakers.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Brain hemispheres with right temporal lobe damage swap dominance in early auditory processing of lexical tones.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Myeloarchitectonic Asymmetries of Language Regions in the Human Brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Human cortical encoding of pitch in tonal and non-tonal languages.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Intonation processing increases task-specific fronto-temporal connectivity in tonal language speakers.Human brain mapping · 2021Article
- Right inferior frontal gyrus: An integrative hub in tonal bilinguals.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non-tonal language speakers.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Tone language experience-dependent advantage in pitch representation in brainstem and auditory cortex is maintained under reverberation.Hearing research · 2019Article
- The Functional Neuroanatomy of Lexical Tone Perception: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The neural systems of lexical tone processing have been studied for many years. However, previous findings have been mixed with regard to the hemispheric specialization for the perception of linguistic pitch patterns in native speakers of tonal language. In this study, we performed two activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses, one on neuroimaging studies of auditory processing of lexical tones in tonal languages (17 studies), and the other on auditory processing of lexical information in non-tonal languages as a control analysis for comparison (15 studies). The lexical tone ALE analysis showed significant brain activations in bilateral inferior prefrontal regions, bilateral superior temporal regions and the right caudate, while the control ALE analysis showed significant cortical activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus and left temporo-parietal regions. However, we failed to obtain significant differences from the contrast analysis between two auditory conditions, which might be caused by the limited number of studies available for comparison. Although the current study lacks evidence to argue for a lexical tone specific activation pattern, our results provide clues and directions for future investigations on this topic, more sophisticated methods are needed to explore this question in more depth as well.
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