It is generally believed that the left hemisphere is dominant for phonemic processing and the right hemisphere is more involved in processing prosodic features [1, 2, 3]. More recent studies [4, 5, 6], however, indicate that lateralization of different levels of prosody varies with their1 functional load as well as listeners' linguistic experience. For example, whereas processing of monosyllabic lexical tone is left hemisphere dominant for native, but not non-native listeners; that of emotional intonation in phrasal or sentential length is right hemisphere dominant for both native and non-native listeners. The processing of Japanese pitch accent poses an interesting question, since pitch accent in Japanese, same as lexical tones in Mandarin, is used to differentiate word meanings The domain where pitch accent realizes, however, is usually larger than Mandarin tones; thus reduces its functional load [4].
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