Re: OT: Interesting article

On 1 July, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> 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.
    I'm sorry, but I'm a bit confused by this. Perhaps I don't understand
what
you mean by "normal decoding of sound inputs". My understanding was
that "meaning" at various levels was extracted at all the stages of
processing of auditory inputs. If there is research to the contrary,
I would certainly like to read it!
    About the article. Thanks for pointing it out to us. Perhaps I shouldn't
be
overly critical since it is a news summary and not a journal article.
Still , I have a couple of comments:
    First I would like to know more about the experimental setup and
the number and type of speakers tested.  "Using brain scans on volunteers"
doesn't tell us much.
    Second, regarding relearning language after stroke, use of the right
hemisphere in lang therapy is not new. Some thirty years ago,
I was personally given a demonstration of the technique by the man who
had developed it. He was, IIRC, working at the Boston VA hospital at the
time.

>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.
IMHO, that is a bit simplistic. I have heard that professional musicians
also use their left hemispheres to appehend music and there are
speech-related areas in the right hemisphere, even for English speakers!

Dan Sulani
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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a

A word is an awesome thing.

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