Presentation
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Increased electrical brain responses to speech sounds in native vs. non-native listeners in passive but not in active listening condition
Poster D62 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Piia Astikainen1, Tiantian Yang1, Jari L.O. Kurkela1, Kecheng Chen2, Youyi Liu2, Hua Shu2, Fengyu Cong1,3, Jarmo A. Hämäläinen1; 1University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, 2Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, 3Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
In previous electrophysiological studies, change detection brain responses have tended to be increased for native vs. non-native speech sounds. However, studies that include both passive and active listening conditions in the same participants are scarce. We compared the event-related potentials (ERPs) of native Finnish and Chinese speakers for changes in vowel's duration and its lexical tone, which are linguistic features in Finnish and Mandarin Chinese, respectively. We examined ERP amplitudes extracted as principal components reflecting change detection (mismatch negativity; MMN and N2b) and attention shift toward changes (P3a and P3b). In the passive listening condition, duration changes elicited increased MMN amplitudes in the Finnish group compared to the Chinese group for both standard and deviant sounds, but no group differences were observed for P3a. In passive listening, tones elicited an increased P3a amplitude in the Chinese for both standard and deviant stimuli, but there were no differences between groups in MMN. No robust group differences were observed when participants actively listened to the same speech sounds. The results suggest an overall increased sensitivity to task-irrelevant native speech sounds, and enhanced brain responses to actively attended foreign speech sounds.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,