title: Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses.
abstract: There is considerable debate about whether the early processing of sounds depends on whether they form part of speech. Proponents of such speech specificity postulate the existence of language-dependent memory traces, which are activated in the processing of speech but not when equally complex, acoustic non-speech stimuli are processed. Here we report the existence of these traces in the human brain. We presented to Finnish subjects the Finnish phoneme prototype /e/ as the frequent stimulus, and other Finnish phoneme prototypes or a non-prototype (the Estonian prototype /õ/) as the infrequent stimulus. We found that the brain's automatic change-detection response, reflected electrically as the mismatch negativity (MMN), was enhanced when the infrequent, deviant stimulus was a prototype (the Finnish /ö/) relative to when it was a non-prototype (the Estonian /õ/). These phonemic traces, revealed by MMN, are language-specific, as /õ/ caused enhancement of MMN in Estonians. Whole-head magnetic recordings located the source of this native-language, phoneme-related response enhancement, and thus the language-specific memory traces, in the auditory cortex of the left hemisphere.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland. risto.naatanen@helsinki.fi
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Näätänen
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lehtokoski
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lennes
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cheour
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Huotilainen
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Iivonen
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vainio
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Alku
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Ilmoniemi
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Luuk
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Allik
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sinkkonen
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Alho
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004957:Estonia; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008280:Magnetics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*