Phonological grammar shapes the auditory cortex: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Charlotte Jacquemot (1, 2) , Christophe Pallier (3) , Denis Lebihan (4) , Stanislas Dehaene (5) , Emmanuel Dupoux (6)

1 DEC - Département d'Etudes Cognitives - ENS Paris
2 IMRB - Institut Mondor de Recherche Biomédicale
3 UNICOG-U992 - Neuroimagerie cognitive - Psychologie cognitive expérimentale
4 SHFJ - Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot
5 I2BM - Institut d'Imagerie BioMédicale
6 LSCP - Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique

Languages differ depending on the set of basic sounds they use (the inventory of consonants and vowels) and on the way in which these sounds can be combined to make up words and phrases (phonological grammar). Previous research has shown that our inventory of consonants and vowels affects the way in which our brains decode foreign sounds (Goto, 1971; Näätänen et al., 1997; Kuhl, 2000). Here, we show that phonological grammar has an equally potent effect. We build on previous research, which shows that stimuli that are phonologically ungrammatical are assimilated to the closest grammatical form in the language (Dupoux et al., 1999). In a cross-linguistic design using French and Japanese participants and a fast event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm, we show that phonological grammar involves the left superior temporal and the left anterior supramarginal gyri, two regions previously associated with the processing of human vocal sounds.

Mots clés: speech perception; cross linguistic study; language specific illusion; planum temporale; fMRI; phonological grammar

Domaines: Sciences cognitives; Neurosciences; Linguistique; Psychologie

Charlotte Jacquemot, Christophe Pallier, Denis Lebihan, Stanislas Dehaene, Emmanuel Dupoux. Phonological grammar shapes the auditory cortex: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study.. Journal of Neuroscience, 2003, 23 (29), pp.9541-6. ⟨hal-02326865⟩