title: Brain responses reveal the learning of foreign language phonemes.
abstract: Learning to speak a new language requires the formation of recognition patterns for the speech sounds specific to the newly acquired language. The present study demonstrates the dynamic nature of cortical memory representations for phonemes in adults by using the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential. We studied Hungarian and Finnish subjects, dividing the Hungarians into a naive (no knowledge of Finnish) and a fluent (in Finnish) group. We found that the MMN for a contrast between two Finnish phonemes was elicited in the fluent Hungarians but not in the naive Hungarians. This result indicates that the fluent Hungarians developed cortical memory representations for the Finnish phoneme system that enabled them to preattentively categorize phonemes specific to this language.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. winkler@cogpsyphy.hu
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Winkler
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kujala
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Tiitinen
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sivonen
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Alku
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lehtokoski
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Czigler
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Csépe
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Ilmoniemi
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Näätänen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*