| dc.description.abstract | The act of speaking is a complex coordination of motor control. It demands simultaneous control of respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory systems. In the human communication studies, understanding of the neural mechanism for speaking becomes essential. The aim of this study is to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method to find neural correlates on Chinese speech production. Simultaneous acquisition of physiological data (such as EMG) and fMRI was explored in this study. The paradigm used in this study has five conditions: (A) normal speech, (B) mouthing speech, (C) unarticulated speech, (D) internal speech, and (E) normal speech. The visual stimuli of the first four conditions are ma1, ma2, ma3, and ma4 and the stimulus for the last one is ma1. From the results, we observed that the areas associated with the control of breathing for speech, vocalization, and hearing were the sensorimotor cortex, supplementary motor area, the superior temporal gyrus, the cerebellum, parietal association area, and the lingual gyrus. The areas associated with articulation observed were the sensorimotor cortex, the cerebellum, the inferior frontal gyrus, anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus, and the precuneus. The areas associated with tone variation were found in bilateral basal ganglia, bilateral hippocampal formation, bilateral parietal association area, the left pre-motor area, the left middle occipital gyrus, and the right cerebellum, the right superior temporal gyrus, and the right midbrain. Neural correlates of speech production and Chinese tone were all related to the cerebellum. Therefore, our results show that the cerebellum plays an important role on Chinese speech production. | en_US |