• Suk-Tak Chan, Sze-Wing Tang, Wing-Kit Lee, Kwok-Wing Tang, Shing-Shun Lo, and Kenneth K Kwong.
• Department of Health Technology and Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. htphoebe@inet.polyu.edu.hk
• Neurosci. Lett. 2009 Oct 2;463(2):103-7.

AbstractEnglish vowels had been proposed in previous studies to be used as a simple tool for the brain mapping of language. A proper fMRI study of Cantonese rhymes, each of which being a required and fundamental unit of a Cantonese syllable, remains to be carried out. Using an auditory task with Cantonese rhymes which carry no semantic meaning, we observed a minimal amount of positive BOLD signal at the caudate nucleus when Cantonese rhymes were contrasted with their corresponding filtered sounds. Typical language activating regions of the prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex and the lateral temporal cortex on both left and right sides were not activated by Cantonese rhymes. Based on the absence of brain activation at the typical language areas in the contrast of Cantonese rhymes relative to filtered sounds, the auditory task with Cantonese rhymes may not be a robust tool for the individual clinical assessment of hemispheric dominance for language.

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