Discrimination of stress in speech and music: a mismatch negativity (MMN) study.
The aim of this study was to determine if duration-related stress in speech and music is processed in a similar way in the brain. To this end, we tested 20 adults for their abstract mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potentials to two duration-related stress patterns: stress on the first syllable or note (long-short), and stress on the second syllable or note (short-long). A significant MMN was elicited for both speech and music except for the short-long speech stimulus. The long-short stimuli elicited larger MMN amplitudes for speech and music compared to short-long stimuli. An extra negativity-the late discriminative negativity (LDN)-was observed only for music. The larger MMN amplitude for long-short stimuli might be due to the familiarity of the stress pattern in speech and music. The presence of LDN for music may reflect greater long-term memory transfer for music stimuli.
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. varghese.peter@mq.edu.au
Varghese
V
Peter
Genevieve
G
McArthur
William Forde
WF
Thompson
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult