Hemispheric Specialization for Tones

Previous research indicates that the left hemisphere of the brain is more adept at phonemic processing，including the processing of phonemes，syllables，and words(Studdert-Kennedy and Shankweiler，1970)，while the right hemisphere is better at melodic and prosodic processing including music，pitch contours，and affective prosody(Bryden and Ley，1982).The processing of lexical tones，therefore，presents an interesting case.The fact that lexical tones are used to make phonemic contrasts would suggest that they are primarily processed by the left hemisphere，however，since lexical tones are instantiated by modulations of F0，one could expect instead that the right hemisphere will be dominant in their processing(Jongman et al.，2006).