Native and foreign vowel discrimination as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) response

Training the Brain to Weight Speech Cues Differently: A Study of Finnish Second-language Users of English

“…Flege (1988) suggested that quantity-language speakers reinterpret the tense versus lax distinction as a quantity distinction and consequently weight the duration cues. In line with this, Peltola et al (2003) found that Finnish students of English did not show native-like MMN responses for the English tense versus lax vowel distinction, when isolated vowels of the same duration were used. To determine the roles of the spectral and the duration cues in the processing of English /i/ and /I/, the present study compared the responses to stimuli with normal duration and with modified duration with each other-in the latter case, the duration cues were ambiguous or equalized.…”

Event-related potentials (ERPs) in the study of bilingual language processing

“…However, learning an L2 in a classroom environment may not lead to the formation of new long-term native-like memory traces. Thus, MMNs from advanced Finnish students of English were significantly smaller than native-like MMNs to vowel contrasts (Peltola et al, 2003). Taken together, these two studies would suggest that immersion with authentic speech input is required for the early cortical processing of foreign speech sounds to become native-like.…”

Phonetic training and non-native speech perception — New memory traces evolve in just three days as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and behavioural measures

“…Native English speakers had classified these two stimuli as belonging to different categories, the individual boundaries were approximately at the midpoint between the training stimuli. The stimuli were non-prototypical representations of the categories because the difference between prototypical stimuli would have been too obvious, leading to ceiling effects as in Peltola et al (2003). The representative of the /fi:l/ category had a VOT of 113 ms and the representative of the /vi:l/ category had a VOT of 71 ms.…”

“…The study by Winkler et al (1999) showed consistent results in the reaction times and the MMN. However, if the acoustic differences between the stimuli are vast, the influence of the native language disappears (Peltola et al, 2003). On the other hand, second language learning may lead to native-like responses (e.g., Peltola et al, 2012;Winkler et al, 1999).…”