Biomaterial Database

Hemispheric specialization of language: an EEG study of bilingual Hopi indian children. 1977

L Rogers, and W TenHouten, and C D Kaplan, and M Gardiner

Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were obtained from electrode placements over the left and right frontal and parietal lobes of the brain in sixteen Hopi Indian children listening to tape recorded children's stories in the Hopi and English languages. Spectral analysis of the EEG data revealed that, for the parietal leads, alpha desynchronization was relatively greater over the right hemisphere for listening to Hopi than for listening to English, which indicates a greater right hemisphere participation in the processing of the Hopi speech. The results of the experiment are directionally consistent with our hypothesis, and imply that linguistic relativity may exist on a neurolinguistic level, such that languages can differ in the relative degree to which they serve as instruments of thought in a propositional, left hemisphere mode, or in an appositional, right hemisphere mode.

UI	MeSH Term	Description	Entries
D007198	Indians, North American	Members of indigenous North American populations with pre-colonial contact origins.	Amerinds, North American,Indigenous North Americans,American Indian, North,American, Indigenous North,Amerind, North American,Indian, North American,Indigenous North American,North American Amerind,North American Amerinds,North American Indian,North American Indians,North American, Indigenous
D007802	Language	A verbal or nonverbal means of communicating ideas or feelings.	Dialect,Dialects,Languages
D001931	Brain Mapping	Imaging techniques used to colocalize sites of brain functions or physiological activity with brain structures.	Brain Electrical Activity Mapping,Functional Cerebral Localization,Topographic Brain Mapping,Brain Mapping, Topographic,Functional Cerebral Localizations,Mapping, Brain,Mapping, Topographic Brain
D002648	Child	A person 6 to 12 years of age. An individual 2 to 5 years old is CHILD, PRESCHOOL.	Children
D004292	Dominance, Cerebral	Dominance of one cerebral hemisphere over the other in cerebral functions.	Cerebral Dominance,Hemispheric Specialization,Dominances, Cerebral,Specialization, Hemispheric
D004569	Electroencephalography	Recording of electric currents developed in the brain by means of electrodes applied to the scalp, to the surface of the brain, or placed within the substance of the brain.	EEG,Electroencephalogram,Electroencephalograms
D006801	Humans	Members of the species Homo sapiens.	Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D001130	Arizona	State of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA bounded on the east by New Mexico, on the north by Utah, on the west by Nevada and California, and on the south by Mexico.
D001307	Auditory Perception	The process whereby auditory stimuli are selected, organized, and interpreted by the organism.	Auditory Processing,Perception, Auditory,Processing, Auditory
D013067	Speech Perception	The process whereby an utterance is decoded into a representation in terms of linguistic units (sequences of phonetic segments which combine to form lexical and grammatical morphemes).	Speech Discrimination,Discrimination, Speech,Perception, Speech