Lateralization of Auditory Processing of Silbo Gomero
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Biopsychology, Department of Psychology, Ruhr University Bochum, 44801 Bochum, Germany
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Symmetry 2020, 12(7), 1183; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12071183
Received: 22 April 2020 / Revised: 17 June 2020 / Accepted: 5 July 2020 / Published: 17 July 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Cognitive and Neurophysiological Models of Brain Asymmetry)
Left-hemispheric language dominance is a well-known characteristic of the human language system. However, it has been shown that leftward language lateralization decreases dramatically when people communicate using whistles. Whistled languages present a transformation of a spoken language into whistles, facilitating communication over great distances. In order to investigate the laterality of Silbo Gomero, a form of whistled Spanish, we used a vocal and a whistled dichotic listening task in a sample of 75 healthy Spanish speakers. Both individuals that were able to whistle and to understand Silbo Gomero and a non-whistling control group showed a clear right-ear advantage for vocal dichotic listening. For whistled dichotic listening, the control group did not show any hemispheric asymmetries. In contrast, the whistlers’ group showed a right-ear advantage for whistled stimuli. This right-ear advantage was, however, smaller compared to the right-ear advantage found for vocal dichotic listening. In line with a previous study on language lateralization of whistled Turkish, these findings suggest that whistled language processing is associated with a decrease in left and a relative increase in right hemispheric processing. This shows that bihemispheric processing of whistled language stimuli occurs independent of language.
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Keywords:
Silbo Gomero; whistle language; cerebral lateralization; brain asymmetry; dichotic listening task
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MDPI and ACS Style
Villar González, P.; Güntürkün, O.; Ocklenburg, S. Lateralization of Auditory Processing of Silbo Gomero. Symmetry 2020, 12, 1183. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12071183
AMA Style
Villar González P, Güntürkün O, Ocklenburg S. Lateralization of Auditory Processing of Silbo Gomero. Symmetry. 2020; 12(7):1183. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12071183
Chicago/Turabian StyleVillar González, Pamela; Güntürkün, Onur; Ocklenburg, Sebastian. 2020. "Lateralization of Auditory Processing of Silbo Gomero" Symmetry 12, no. 7: 1183. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12071183
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