Neurophysiological Correlates of Asymmetries in Vowel Perception: An English-French Cross-Linguistic Event-Related Potential Study release_ppcvuasc3ffx7cmdtxxoaqvbxe

by Linda Polka, Monika Molnar, T. Christina Zhao, Matthew Masapollo

Published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by Frontiers Media SA.

2021   Volume 15, p607148

Abstract

Behavioral studies examining vowel perception in infancy indicate that, for many vowel contrasts, the ease of discrimination changes depending on the order of stimulus presentation, regardless of the language from which the contrast is drawn and the ambient language that infants have experienced. By adulthood, linguistic experience has altered vowel perception; analogous asymmetries are observed for non−native contrasts but are mitigated for native contrasts. Although these directional effects are well documented behaviorally, the brain mechanisms underlying them are poorly understood. In the present study we begin to address this gap. We first review recent behavioral work which shows that vowel perception asymmetries derive from phonetic encoding strategies, rather than general auditory processes. Two existing theoretical models–the Natural Referent Vowel framework and the Native Language Magnet model–are invoked as a means of interpreting these findings. Then we present the results of a neurophysiological study which builds on this prior work. Using event-related brain potentials, we first measured and assessed the mismatch negativity response (MMN, a passive neurophysiological index of auditory change detection) in English and French native-speaking adults to synthetic vowels that either spanned two different phonetic categories (/y/vs./u/) or fell within the same category (/u/). Stimulus presentation was organized such that each vowel was presented as standard and as deviant in different blocks. The vowels were presented with a long (1,600-ms) inter-stimulus interval to restrict access to short-term memory traces and tap into a "phonetic mode" of processing. MMN analyses revealed weak asymmetry effects regardless of the (i) vowel contrast, (ii) language group, and (iii) MMN time window. Then, we conducted time-frequency analyses of the standard epochs for each vowel. In contrast to the MMN analysis, time-frequency analysis revealed significant differences in brain oscillations in the theta band (4–8 Hz), which have been linked to attention and processing efficiency. Collectively, these findings suggest that early-latency (pre-attentive) mismatch responses may not be a strong neurophysiological correlate of asymmetric behavioral vowel discrimination. Rather, asymmetries may reflect differences in neural processing efficiency for vowels with certain inherent acoustic-phonetic properties, as revealed by theta oscillatory activity.
In application/xml+jats format

Archived Files and Locations

application/pdf  6.0 MB
file_6eseoyphujf5phajbzxavwb5rq
fjfsdata01prod.blob.core.windows.net (publisher)
web.archive.org (webarchive)

Web Captures

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2021.607148/full
2022-06-15 01:00:14 | 39 resources
webcapture_a6owgdun5vhcpl4s5tdv7fb7we
web.archive.org (webarchive)
Read Archived PDF
Preserved and Accessible
Type  article-journal
Stage   published
Date   2021-06-03
Language   en ?
Container Metadata
Open Access Publication
In DOAJ
In ISSN ROAD
In Keepers Registry
ISSN-L:  1662-5161
Work Entity
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)
Catalog Record
Revision: 54cc2b6c-5353-4885-8ff4-d0c78ce0b033
API URL: JSON