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Individuals who have been exposed to two different musical cultures (bimusicals) can be differentiated from those exposed to only one musical culture (monomusicals). Just as bilingual speakers handle the distinct language-syntactic rules of each of two languages, bimusical listeners handle two distinct musical-syntactic rules (e.g., tonal schemas) in each musical culture. This study sought to determine specific brain activities that contribute to differentiating two culture-specific tonal structures. We recorded magnetoencephalogram (MEG) responses of bimusical Japanese nonmusicians and amateur musicians as they monitored unfamiliar Western melodies and unfamiliar, but traditional, Japanese melodies, both of which contained tonal deviants (out-of-key tones). Previous studies with Western monomusicals have shown that tonal deviants elicit an early right anterior negativity (mERAN) originating in the inferior frontal cortex. In the present study, tonal deviants in both Western and Japanese melodies elicited mERANs with characteristics fitted by dipoles around the inferior frontal gyrus in the right hemisphere and the premotor cortex in the left hemisphere. Comparisons of the nature of mERAN activity to Western and Japanese melodies showed differences in the dipoles' locations but not in their peak latency or dipole strength. These results suggest that the differentiation between a tonal structure of one culture and that of another culture correlates with localization differences in brain subregions around the inferior frontal cortex and the premotor cortex., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The present study examined whether both vowel-shortening and vowel-lengthening violations would elicit a semantic field component in native speakers of Japanese, and whether such a component would also be observed in phonemic violations. Stimuli contained semantically correct and incorrect versions of two types of vowel duration (shortening and lengthening), and semantically deviant words with phonemic violations. Five hundred Japanese sentences were aurally presented to each subject, while neuromagnetic fields were recorded using a dual 37-channel gradiometer system. A prominent magnetic field component, peaking at around 400 ms after the onset of the target word, was elicited by vowel-shortening and phonemic violations in the left hemisphere only, but not vowel-lengthening violations. This semantic field component was labeled the 'SeF-M400'. The results suggest that auditory semantic mechanism is more sensitive to vowel-shortening violations than to vowel-lengthening violations.

The article focuses on the Tenth Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry International Symposium on Visualization of Information Processing in the Human Brain: Recent Advances in MEG and Functional MRI which is to be held on October 12-13, 1995 in Tokyo, Japan. This international symposium will focus on the rapidly advancing progress being made in visualization of human brain functions with magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Leading scientists from Europe, North America and Japan will participate in the symposium.