Language Processing is usually carried out by the left brain hemisphere. This is true for spoken, written or sign languages. But a new study published in the magazine Cell Press Current Biology has discovered an exception to this rule: the Turkish whistling, something that had already verified with the Gomeran silbo.

The Turkish whistling is exactly what it seems: Turkish adapted to a series of whistles. This method of communication was very popular in the old days, before the arrival of the telephone, in little villages of Turkey, as a means for long-distance communication. 

The Turkish whistling has served to question the idea that language is a predominant activity of the left hemisphere, without taking into account the physic structure.

Researchers examined the asymmetry of the brain when processing spoken Turkish and whistled Turkish by emitting spoken words as well as whistled words in the right and left inner ear of the person using headphones.

Then, participants informed of what they had heard. Participants perceived spoken syllables more frequently when they perceive it with the right inner ear, but they listened equally to whistled syllables with both inner ears.

In this way, researches could show that the Turkish whistling is equally processed by the two hemispheres: the left hemisphere is involved since it is a language, but the right hemisphere is equally involved, because for this estrange language all aural specialties of this hemisphere are needed, according to researchers. 

This is important since it means that the predominance of the left hemisphere in the language depends on the physical structure of language.

A similar study published in Nature in 2005 showed through magnetic resonance imaging that interpreting the Gomeran silbo, whistled language practiced by some inhabitants of La Gomera (Canary Islands) to communicate across the ravines, also requires of both brain hemispheres.


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