Salmelin R, Schnitzler A, Parkkonen L, Biermann K, Helenius P, Kiviniemi K, Kuukka K, Schmitz F, Freund H
Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O. Box 2200, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1999 Aug 31;96(18):10460-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.96.18.10460.
Whole-head magnetoencephalography was employed in 40 normal subjects to investigate whether the basic functional organization of the auditory cortex varies with linguistic environment. Robust activations of the bilateral supratemporal auditory cortices to 1-kHz pure tones, maximum at about 100 ms after stimulus onset, were studied in Finnish and German female and male subject groups with monolingual background. Activations elicited by the tones were mutually indistinguishable in German and Finnish women. In contrast, German men showed significantly stronger auditory responses to pure tones in the left, language-dominant hemisphere than Finnish men. We discuss the possibility that the prominent left-hemisphere activation in German males reflects higher frequency resolution required for distinguishing between German than Finnish vowels and that the clear effect of native language in male but not in female auditory cortex derives from more pronounced functional lateralization in men. The present data suggest that the influence of native language can extend to auditory cortical processing of pure-tone stimuli with no linguistic content and that this effect is conspicuous in the male brain.
对40名正常受试者进行全脑磁脑图检查，以研究听觉皮层的基本功能组织是否随语言环境而变化。在具有单语背景的芬兰和德国男女受试者组中，研究了双侧颞上听觉皮层对1kHz纯音的强烈激活，刺激开始后约100毫秒时激活最强。在德国和芬兰女性中，纯音引发的激活相互无明显差异。相比之下，德国男性在左侧语言优势半球对纯音的听觉反应明显强于芬兰男性。我们讨论了这样一种可能性，即德国男性左半球的显著激活反映了区分德语元音比芬兰元音所需的更高频率分辨率，并且母语在男性而非女性听觉皮层中的明显作用源于男性更明显的功能侧化。目前的数据表明，母语的影响可以扩展到对无语言内容的纯音刺激的听觉皮层处理，并且这种影响在男性大脑中很明显。
