Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on July 25, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(4):828-836; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm115
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Volume of Left Heschl's Gyrus and Linguistic Pitch Learning
1 The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA, 2 Northwestern University Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60208, USA, 3 Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, Qubec, Canada, H4B1R6, 4 Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry, West Virginia University School of Medicine–Charleston Area Medical Center, Morgantown, West Virginia, 26505, USA, 5 Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, 60611, USA, 6 Montreal Neurological Institute, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A2B4, 7 Department of Neuropsychology, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, H3A2B4
Address Correspondence to Patrick C. M. Wong, PhD, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Dr, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. Email: pwong{at}northwestern.edu.
Research on the contributions of the human nervous system to language processing and learning has generally been focused on the association regions of the brain without considering the possible contribution of primary and adjacent sensory areas. We report a study examining the relationship between the anatomy of Heschl's Gyrus (HG), which includes predominately primary auditory areas and is often found to be associated with nonlinguistic pitch processing and language learning. Unlike English, most languages of the world use pitch patterns to signal word meaning. In the present study, native English-speaking adult subjects learned to incorporate foreign pitch patterns in word identification. Subjects who were less successful in learning showed a smaller HG volume on the left (especially gray matter volume), but not on the right, relative to learners who were successful. These results suggest that HG, typically shown to be associated with the processing of acoustic cues in nonspeech processing, is also involved in speech learning. These results also suggest that primary auditory regions may be important for encoding basic acoustic cues during the course of spoken language learning.
Key Words: auditory cortex • auditory perception • Heschl's Gyrus • language processing • speech learning • speech perception