Study of neural correlates of mandarin tonal production with neural network model

In linguistics, Mandarin tone is related to Mandarin word and sentence recognition rates. Neuropsychologically, the neural correlates of Mandarin tonal production remain controversial. The long-range aim of this study is to develop a model for analyzing Mandarin speech production. This study modifies the directions into velocities of articulators (DIVA) model to include tone production to simulate Mandarin tonal production and the resulting brain activation. Simulated brain activities for the production of different vowels with a given tone (/a/-/u/) appear on the motor and pre-motor cortices and the inferior frontal gyrus. The activity for the production of a given vowel with four different Mandarin tones (/a/, /á/, /ã/, and /à/) appears in the motor and pre-motor cortices. These results show that the modified DIVA model can be used to study the neural correlates of Mandarin tonal production.