No place for /h/: an ERP investigation of English fricative place features

Schluter, Kevin; Politzer-Ahles, Stephen; Almeida, Diogo

doi:10.1080/23273798.2016.1151058

Cited by 25 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…These authors found that in cases where the deviant stimulus items presented a feature that was a mismatch when compared with those features stored for the standard, the MMN component elicited had a greater amplitude and earlier peak latency than that elicited by deviant items that were a no-mismatch . A similar asymmetry was observed by Schluter et al (2016) in the perception of fricative noise bursts for [s] and [h]: a mismatch deviant stimulus type elicited a larger MMN than a no-mismatch deviant, supporting the view that the phonological representation of [h] has no place features (see Phonological Consequences of the Phonetic Properties of [h]). In the case reported here, all the features present in our deviant [h]-less items are a subset of the features present in our standard items, which are stored for evaluation of deviance.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Using Event-Related Brain Potentials to Assess Perceptibility: The Case of French Speakers and English [h]

2016

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French speaking learners of English encounter persistent difficulty acquiring English [h], thus confusing words like eat and heat in both production and perception. We assess the hypothesis that the acoustic properties of [h] may render detection of this segment in the speech stream insufficiently reliable for second language acquisition. We use the mismatch negativity (MMN) in event-related potentials to investigate [h] perception in French speaking learners of English and native English controls, comparing both linguistic and non-linguistic conditions in an unattended oddball paradigm. Unlike native speakers, French learners of English elicit an MMN response only in the non-linguistic condition. Our results provide neurobiological evidence against the hypothesis that French speakers’ difficulties with [h] are acoustically based. They instead suggest that the problem is in constructing an appropriate phonological representation for [h] in the interlanguage grammar.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Using Event-Related Brain Potentials to Assess Perceptibility: The Case of French Speakers and English [h]

2016

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“…Eulitz and Lahiri, 2004; Scharinger et al, 2010, 2012; Cornell et al, 2011, 2013; de Jonge and Boersma, 2015; Schluter et al, 2016). Furthermore, the more negative peak for the voiceless deviant suggests that it is the voiceless sound which is marked for English fricatives, just as Hestvik and Durvasula (2016) found for English stops.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

et al. 2017

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Many theories of phonology assume that the sound structure of language is made up of distinctive features, but there is considerable debate about how much articulatory detail distinctive features encode in long-term memory. Laryngeal features such as voicing provide a unique window into this question: while many languages have two-way contrasts that can be given a simple binary feature account [±VOICE], the precise articulatory details underlying these contrasts can vary significantly across languages. Here, we investigate a series of two-way voicing contrasts in English, Arabic, and Russian, three languages that implement their voicing contrasts very differently at the articulatory-phonetic level. In three event-related potential experiments contrasting English, Arabic, and Russian fricatives along with Russian stops, we observe a consistent pattern of asymmetric mismatch negativity (MMN) effects that is compatible with an articulatorily abstract and cross-linguistically uniform way of marking two-way voicing contrasts, as opposed to an articulatorily precise and cross-linguistically diverse way of encoding them. Regardless of whether a language is theorized to encode [VOICE] over [SPREAD GLOTTIS], the data is consistent with a universal marking of the [SPREAD GLOTTIS] feature.

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“…Syllables in the 3rd position (XXY deviant) differ in their consonant voicing and place of articulation, and in their vowel height (Mioni, 1993;Kramer, 2009;Paoli, 2016). While it should be noted that whether all these phonological features have a neural representation is on itself an open debate (Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016;Politzer-Ahles et al, 2016;Schluter et al, 2016Schluter et al, , 2017, in the case of our stimuli set, the number of phonological features that change for each deviant condition is the same.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Electroencephalography (EEG) studies have identified an event related potential (ERP) known as N400, whose amplitude is inversely correlated with the semantic predictability of words in context (Ku-tas and Hillyard, 1980;Van Petten et al, 1999;Brink et al, 2001;Federmeier, 2000, 2011;Freunberger and Roehm, 2016;DeLong et al, 2005). EEG evidence has also shown that forthcoming phonemes can be predicted using syntactic (DeLong et al, 2005), semantic (Bendixen et al, 2014;Kashino, 2006;Groppe et al, 2010), phonological (Cornell et al, 2011;Hestvik and Durvasula, 2016;Schluter et al, 2016;Scharinger et al, 2016) and phonotactic information (Dehaene-Lambertz et al, 2000;Sun et al, 2015;Ylinen et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural signals to violations of abstract rules using speech-like stimuli

Vidal

Brusini

Bonfieni

et al. 2019

Preprint

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As the evidence of predictive processes playing a role in a wide variety of cognitive domains increases, the brain as a predictive machine becomes a central idea in neuroscience. In auditory processing a considerable amount of progress has been made using variations of the Oddball design, but most of the existing work seems restricted to predictions based on physical features or conditional rules linking successive stimuli. To characterise the predictive capacity of the brain to abstract rules, we present here two experiments that use speech-like stimuli to overcome limitations and avoid common confounds. Pseudowords were presented in isolation, intermixed with infrequent deviants that contained unexpected phoneme sequences. As hypothesized, the occurrence of unexpected sequences of phonemes reliably elicited an early prediction error signal. These prediction error signals do not seemed to be modulated by attentional manipulations due to different task instructions, suggesting that the predictions are deployed even when the task at hand does not volitionally involve error detection. In contrast, the amount of syllables congruent with a standard pseudoword presented before the point of deviance exerted a strong modulation. Prediction error's amplitude doubled when two congruent syllables were presented instead of one, despite keeping local transitional probabilities constant. This suggest that auditory predictions can be built integrating information beyond the immediate past. In sum, the results presented here further contribute to the understanding of the predictive capabilities of the human auditory system when facing complex stimuli and abstract rules. Significance StatementThe generation of predictions seem to be a prevalent brain computation. In the case of auditory processing this information is intrinsically temporal. The study of auditory predictions has been largely circumscribed to unexpected physical stimuli features or rules connecting consecutive stimuli. In contrast, our everyday experience suggest that the human auditory system is capable of more sophisticated predictions. This becomes evident in the case of speech processing, where abstract rules with long range dependencies are universal. In this article, we present two electroencephalography experiments that use speech-like stimuli to explore the predictive capabilities of the human auditory system. The results presented here increase the understanding of the ability of our auditory system to implement predictions using information beyond the immediate past.

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No place for /h/: an ERP investigation of English fricative place features

Cited by 25 publications

References 56 publications

Using Event-Related Brain Potentials to Assess Perceptibility: The Case of French Speakers and English [h]

Using Event-Related Brain Potentials to Assess Perceptibility: The Case of French Speakers and English [h]

Laryngeal Features Are Phonetically Abstract: Mismatch Negativity Evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian

Neural signals to violations of abstract rules using speech-like stimuli

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