As for the BBC article, I can’t really comment, without seeing the original research report (I haven’t been able to find a published report after a quick search, but I’m curious to track it down). The reason I can’t comment on it is that I don’t know exactly what stimuli were used in the study. In the research that I referred to, people didn’t just listen to running speech—rather, they were focused on the very particular task of discriminating between Mandarin words that differed only in tone. With more complex language, it’s possible to see plenty of activity in both hemispheres, certainly among English-speakers as well. So without directly comparing what people were being exposed to in the experiments, I have no idea if it bears directly on the cross-langauge results on tone that I reported.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3025796.stm

The BBC article suggests Mandarin speakers use their left and right temporal lobes when listening to Mandarin, while you say that Mandarin speakers use only their left temporal lobe when listening to Mandarin. Please elaborate.

As for the mystery of the third tone, it’s a falling-rising tone. It starts low, gets lower, then rises to a level higher than where it started. Since it’s lengthy to describe what this tone does, people have sometimes truncated the description to “low tone” etc. I prefer to call it the third tone. In fact, in normal speech, it has been shown to sound like a low tone, so I don’t think there is anything wrong with calling it that. Here is a tone chart, and further explanation:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/12/10/toward-better-tones-in-natural-speech

Wait a minute, that was real language in the movie? I knew of click-languages, but thought that movie parodied the effect. Learn something new every day.

I speak passable Spanish, and have taken a few classes in (poorly so-called) “Mandarin” Chinese language. According to our books and recordings, as well as several instructors (from China), some of what is declared here is very close to correct, but not quite so.

So please let me make a technical point. That word “ma” (horse) is NOT “a low falling tone”. Instead, from a dictionary perspective, it is a “third” (or “dipping”) tone which BEGINS as “a low falling tone” and which continues to a rapidly rising tone. However, when it is followed immediately by another third-tone syllable, it is pronounced as a “second” (or “rising”) tone!!!

Another technical note. There is ALSO a “null” tone — also called an “empty” tone, a “weak” tone, a “soft” tone, etc. The most-commonly cited character illustration is a spoken question-mark which is used for a “yes-or-no” question, sort-of like “Okay?” or “Right?” in English.

Still another technical note. There are a GREAT many characters which are pronounced in each of the five tones of “ma” — and each character (1) has a distinctive range of translations, AND (2) contributes to words and phrases, each of which has its OWN correct translations.

All of which shows that Chinese is every bit as sophisticated as English — but in radically different ways! It reminds me of the story of some professor (certainly, I assume, NOT Prof. Sedivy!) who observed that, in some languages, a “double negative” is understood as a “positive”, whereas in other languages, it is understood as an “emphatic negative”. Then he dared to state that it is peculiar that there is no language in which a “triple positive” is understood as a negative. A sleepy voice from the rear of the classroom commented, “Yeah, yeah, YEAH.” (I wish I knew who to credit for that one!)

The Ford Focus ‘dude’ commercial reminded me of this credit card ‘yo’ commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7rm-yadkGY