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English speakers pick up pitch in the right hemispheres of their rains, but speakers of certain other languages perceive it on the left as well. It all depends one what you want to learn from pitch, Donald Wong of the Indiana School of Medicine in Indianapolis told the meeting last week. Earlier studies have shown that when an English speaker hears pitch changes, the right pre- frontal cortex leaps into action. This fits in with the idea that emotive nuances of language—which min English are often carried by the rise and fail of the voice--are perceived on the right.
But in" tonal” languages like Thai, Mandarin and Swedish, pitch not only carries emotional in-formation, but can also alter the meaning of a word. Wong and his colleagues suspected that a speaker of tonal language would register pitch in the left side of the brain--in particular Broca's are a, which processes the linguistic content of language.
To test this, the team asked English speakers and Thai speakers to listen to 80 pairs of Thai words, and tracked the blood flow in their brains using positron emission tomography. The volunteers had to decide whether the two words sounded the same, either by consonant or by tone. In some eases, the words had no intelligible meaning.
None of the words was:em0tionally charged, so even when Thai speakers could understand them, there was no right-side ~activation. But sure enough the Thai speakers consistently lit up the left side of the brain, especially Broca's area, while the English speakers did not. ~
The researchers ~w planning to repeat the experiment with Thai speakers using whole sentences, complete emotional information. "Both hemispheres will be engaged," predicts Wong.
1. The reason why pitch is registered on the right hemisphere, according to the passage, is that it
A. belongs English language exclusively
B. is an emotive nuance of language
C. can be easily heard
D. is a regular sound
2. When the emotion-free words were heard in the test, they
A. were registered on the English speakers' right hemispheres
B. slowed down the blood flow in the volunteers' brains
C. activated the Thai speakers' left hemispheres
D. sounded the exactly the same to the volunteers
3. A tonal language
A. possess no pitch
B. carries pitch with dual functions
C. is superior to the English language
D. holds more linguistic content than English
4. In Wong's future experiment, the volunteers
A. will use either their right or left hemispheres
B. will use both English and a tonal language
C. will listen to emotionally-charged sentences
D. will listen to more pairs of emotionally-charged words
5. What is the passage mainly about?
A. Two hemispheres to the sound of speech.
B. Two functions of pitch in language.
C. Two hemispheres of the human brain.
D. Two languages and two hemispheres.
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