Abstract
In this study, brain activation when listening to spoken Japanese with incorrect pitch accents was investigated. In the event-related fMRI experiment, four kinds of stimuli were prepared. (1) NORMAL: Real words with a correct pitch accent. (2) INCORRECT: Real words with incorrect pitch accent. (3) PSEUDO: Pseudo-words, and (4) BASE: amplitude-modulated pseudo-speech noise. Fifteen normal right-handed participants were scanned by functional MRI while listening to these stimuli. Region of interest (ROI) analyses were performed. The contrast between INCORRECT and NORMAL revealed significant activation in the bilateral inferior frontal, the bilateral precentral, and the left supplementary motor area, and the right superior temporal gyrus. The result supports the view that speech perception is a sensory-motor process, and suggests that when the pitch accent of the stimulus does not match the template, silent rehearsal might be repeated to enable a lexical decision to be made.
