This course will give a brief introduction to the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential and how it applies to language (Näätänen, 2001; Näätänen et al., 2007). We will look at how it has been used to measure automatized sensitivity to both allophonic and phonemic distinctions, both within and across languages (Kazanina et al., 2006; Miglietta et al., 2013; Sharma & Dorman, 2000; Truckenbrodt et al., 2014).

Readings

Kazanina, N., Phillips, C., & Idsardi, W. J. (2006). The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(30), 11381–11386. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0604821103

Miglietta, S., Grimaldi, M., & Calabrese, A. (2013). Conditioned allophony in speech perception: An ERP study. Brain and Language, 126(3), 285–290. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BANDL.2013.06.001

Näätänen, R. (2001). The perception of speech sounds by the human brain as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) and its magnetic equivalent (MMNm). Psychophysiology, 38(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8986.3810001

Näätänen, R., Paavilainen, P., Rinne, T., & Alho, K. (2007). The mismatch negativity (MMN) in basic research of central auditory processing: A review. Clinical Neurophysiology, 118(12), 2544–2590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2007.04.026

Sharma, A., & Dorman, M. F. (2000). Neurophysiologic correlates of cross-language phonetic perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107(5), 2697–2703. https://doi.org/doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.428655

Truckenbrodt, H., Steinberg, J., & Jacobsen, T. K. (2014). Evidence for the role of German final devoicing in pre-attentive speech processing: a mismatch negativity study. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1317. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01317