Lee, J. R. 1, 3 , Chen, Y. 2 , Cheng, W. 1 , Chen, Y. 1 & Cheng, S. 3, 4
1 Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
2 Department of Special Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
3 Laboratories for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
4 Graduate Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University, Taiwan
The mismatch negativity (MMN) component of auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) was used to investigate and compare the sensitivity of adult native Chinese speakers to the tonal feature in Mandarin Chinese, the place of articulation feature in English, and the phonetic feature of duration in Finnish.
Participants engaged in three blocks of auditory oddball tasks while they were instructed to watch silent videos. In each block, the materials contained one standard stimulus and two deviant stimuli. The auditory materials for the three blocks were Chinese syllables with different tones ([fau2] as standard, [fau4] and [fau1] as deviants; the numbers label the tones in Mandarin Chinese), English syllables with different articulation places ([ba] as standard, [da] and [ga] as deviants), and Finnish syllables with different consonant durations (ata1, ata4, ata8; numbers mean the duration of consonant), respectively. All these syllables are non-words in their own languages. Note that in all three languages, one of the deviant easier to be discriminated from the standard than the other deviant. For instance, for the Finnish sounds, the durations of gap in ata1, ata4, and ata8 are 74ms, 116ms and 210ms, respectively.
The ERPs elicited by deviant stimuli were found to be more negative-going than standard stimulus during 100-250 ms after signal difference between the standard and deviant stimuli, were observed. This MMN effect was robust as it was found whether the auditory material is a native language (Chinese), a second language (English), or a language that the participants have never been exposed to (Finnish); and whether the deviant was easy or hard to be discriminated from the standard stimuli. Detail results will be reported at the workshop.