Unlike standard spoken languages, which typically elicit left-hemisphere dominance during auditory processing in right-handed individuals, whistled languages—acoustic transforms of spoken phonemes into continuous pitch contours—recruit neural substrates in both cerebral hemispheres. Neuroimaging of fluent whistlers of Silbo Gomero (a whistled register of Spanish) reveals robust bilateral activation in the superior temporal gyri during sentence comprehension. Conversely, non-whistling Spanish speakers exposed to identical Silbo Gomero recordings show cortical activation restricted primarily to right-hemisphere auditory regions typically engaged in non-linguistic pitch appraisal. When fluent whistlers subsequently listen to standard spoken Spanish, their neural response reverts to conventional left-lateralized language centers. Researchers conclude that right-hemisphere pitch-processing mechanisms in whistled speech do not supplant left-hemisphere linguistic networks, but rather operate concurrently with them to decode phonological information from pitch variations that unpracticed listeners perceive as purely musical.
Which one of the following is most strongly supported by the passage?
- AFluent whistlers of Silbo Gomero activate a greater total volume of cortical tissue when listening to spoken Spanish than they do when listening to whistled Spanish.
- Non-whistling Spanish speakers listening to Silbo Gomero fail to engage the primary left-hemisphere neural regions that they typically recruit when comprehending standard spoken Spanish.Cevap
- CNative Spanish speakers who do not know Silbo Gomero possess lower general auditory pitch discrimination thresholds than fluent whistlers do.
- DThe right cerebral hemisphere is generally incapable of assisting in the extraction of linguistic meaning from acoustic speech signals.
- EExposure to whistled languages causes permanent reorganizations of auditory cortex architecture that diminish left-hemisphere specialization for spoken languages.