The frontal and temporal lobe in the identification of laryngeal contrasts

Abstract

To investigate neuroanatomical correlates of the categorization of laryngeally contrastive phonemes, an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed during an auditory identification task in which 10 participants were distinguished among the three types of word-initial stop phonemes, either lax, tense, or aspirated. Perception of the aspirated consonant series elicited significantly higher activation in the inferior frontal gyrus as compared with both the lax and tense series, and the tense series showed significantly higher activation in the left superior temporal gyrus in comparison with either the lax or the aspirated series. The results show differential involvement of frontal and temporal lobe language areas for distinct phonemic contrasts, supporting a linguistic feature formulation model that posits variably specified phonological representations for the three-way distinctions.