Whistled Turkish challenges notions about language and the brain

Whistled Turkish challenges notions about language and the brain
Onur Güntürkün conducting the study with a Turkish farmer. Credit: Onur Güntürkün


"We are unbelievably lucky that such a indeed exists," says Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. "It is a true experiment of nature."





Short scene of two men whistling across a valley of about 700 meters in Ku?köy, Turkey. After exchanging greetings, the closer person asks the distant fellow if he will later on come to the café. The distant person promises to do so. Then Onur Güntürkün asks the close whistler to transmit his greetings. As a response, the distant fellow greets back and asks when the "teacher" (O.G.) will leave the village. When being told (whistled) that departure is planned for the next day, he wishes a smooth journey. Finally, the person close to the camera also transmits best wishes of Osman, a person standing close. The distant person greets back, also in the name of his wife Nazmiye, who joined him on the terrace of his house. Credit: Onur Güntürkün

Whistled Turkish is clearly fascinating in its own right, but Güntürkün and his colleagues also realized that it presented a perfect opportunity to test the notion that language is predominantly a left-brained activity, no matter the that it takes. That's because auditory processing of features, including frequency, pitch, and melody—the stuff that whistles are made of—is a job for the right brain.


"We could show that whistled Turkish creates a balanced contribution of the hemispheres," Güntürkün says. "The is involved since whistled Turkish is a language, but the right hemisphere is equally involved since for this strange language all auditory specializations of this hemisphere are needed."


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More information: Current Biology, Güntürkün et al.: "Whistled Turkish alters language asymmetries" dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.06.067
Journal information: Current Biology

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Citation: Whistled Turkish challenges notions about language and the brain (2015, August 17) retrieved 20 January 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2015-08-turkish-notions-language-brain.html

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