Re: OT: Interesting article

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> Apparently the right half of the brain is involved in understanding
> tonal languages (ignore the stupid misleading headline):
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/06/30/brain.language.reut/index.html
>
> I find this a bit surprising, since previous research has indicated
> that speech understanding is not a postprocessor on sound
> apprehension,
> but rather bypasses, and happens in parallel with, the normal decoding
> of sound inputs.  So it's kind of strange that the part of the brain
> associated with nonlinguistic apprehension of melody is also used when
> understanding melodic speech.
What strikes me as REALLY strange is that, ignoring their misuse of the
word "intonation", they seem to be saying that intonation is handled by
another hemisphere than word tone. This would require that the two kinds of
tonal information are excavated and separately treated on a very early level.
I might've also have expected intonation to be treated _more_ like musical
melody than is word tone, but apparently not.

                                                    Andreas