Linguistic relevance of duration within the native language determines the accuracy of speech-sound duration processing.
As indexed by electrophysiological measures, in native speakers of a language with linguistically significant opposition between short and long phonemes, the pre-attentive detection accuracy of duration changes in speech sounds was tuned in comparison with that in non-speech sounds. This was not observed in advanced second-language users of the same language, suggesting that second-language acquisition does not lead to speech-specific tuning of the duration processing as does native language acquisition in early childhood.
Nenonen
Sari
S
Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 9, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland. sari.nenonen@cbru.helsinki.fi
Shestakova
Anna
A
Huotilainen
Minna
M
Näätänen
Risto
R
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*