MEG detects neural consequences of anomalous nasalization in vowel-consonant pairs.
This study identifies a delay in the neuromagnetic activity evoked by passive auditory presentation of anomalous speech sound combinations. Vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) stimuli were constructed to manipulate vowel nasalization in violation of the patterns of English, in which vowel nasalization ordinarily arises as a predictable coarticulatory effect of anticipatory velum lowering for production of a following nasal consonant. For anomalous stimuli with V1 and C mismatched in nasalization, the neural response to C was delayed relative to congruent control stimuli with V1 and C matched for nasalization. As both anomalous and control stimuli represent linguistically possible speech sound sequences, the temporal disparity in evoked neuromagnetic activity in English speakers reflects a role for language-specific phonological knowledge at the earliest stages of auditory processing.
Flagg
Elissa J
EJ
Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, S546 Ross Building, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M3J 1P3. eflagg@yorku.ca
Oram Cardy
Janis E
JE
Roberts
Timothy P L
TP
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception