We will review the evidence that MMN can provide a privileged view of the abstract phonemes in long-term memory as opposed to momentary phonetic/acoustic sensory representations (Phillips et al., 2000). We will look at how this technique has been used to probe the abstract structure of underspecification (Cornell et al., 2011; Eulitz & Lahiri, 2004; Hestvik et al., 2020; Hestvik & Durvasula, 2016;  Schluter et al., 2017) and abstract features (Monahan, 2018; Monahan et al., 2022; Fu & Monahan, 2021).

Cornell, S. A., Lahiri, A., & Eulitz, C. (2011). “What you encode is not necessarily what you store”: Evidence for sparse feature representations from mismatch negativity. Brain Research, 1394(0), 79–89. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2011.04.001

Eulitz, C., & Lahiri, A. (2004). Neurobiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Representations in the Mental Lexicon during Speech Recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(4), 577–583. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892904323057308

Fu, Z., & Monahan, P. J. (2021). Extracting Phonetic Features From Natural Classes: A Mismatch Negativity Study of Mandarin Chinese Retroflex Consonants. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15(March), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.609898

Hestvik, A., & Durvasula, K. (2016). Neurobiological evidence for voicing underspecification in English. Brain and Language. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2015.10.007

Hestvik, A., Shinohara, Y., Durvasula, K., Verdonschot, R. G., & Sakai, H. (2020). Abstractness of human speech sound representations. Brain Research, 1732(January), 146664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2020.146664

Monahan, P. J. (2018). Phonological Knowledge and Speech Comprehension. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4(1), 21–47. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011817-045537

Monahan, P. J., Schertz, J., Fu, Z., & Pérez, A. (2022). Unified Coding of Spectral and Temporal Phonetic Cues: Electrophysiological Evidence for Abstract Phonological Features. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 34(4), 618–638. https://doi.org/10.1162/JOCN_A_01817

Phillips, C., Pellathy, T., Marantz, A., Yellin, E., Wexler, K., Poeppel, D., McGinnis, M., & Roberts, T. (2000). Auditory cortex accesses phonological categories: an MEG mismatch study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(6), 1038–1055. https://doi.org/10.1162/08989290051137567

Schluter, K. T., Politzer-Ahles, S., Al Kaabi, M., & Almeida, D. (2017). Laryngeal features are phonetically abstract: Mismatch negativity evidence from Arabic, English, and Russian. Frontiers in Psychology, 8(MAY), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00746