Pszicholingvisztika és neurolingvisztika: nyelvtanulás és nyelvtudás, beszédpatológia
Previous studies have reported that multifeature paradigms allow the recording of
Mismatch Negativity (MMN) ERP responses under a short period of time as well as examining
the central auditory processing. In the present study, we developed a multifeature
paradigm, which included five types of changes in the parameters of speech: vowel
change, consonant change, change in prosody (word stress), frequency and intensity.
All changes were made in the initial syllable of a CVCV pseudoword following the Hungarian
phonology. Our purpose was to investigate whether adults were able to pre-attentively
discriminate speech sound features which are altered according to acoustic or phonetic
parameters. Hungarian native speakers were recruited; none of them had any speech
or hearing deficits and were university students. During the experiment, naturally
produced pseudowords were presented through to the participants. The stimuli consisted
of a standard disyllabic word and five types of deviant. Simultaneously with the auditory
pseudowords, participants were asked to watch a film without sound and focus on it.
We found similar results to the previous literature: specifically, MMN responses were
elicited by all the deviants, however with different amplitudes. The vowel and consonant
deviants elicited the largest MMNs, while the intensity and pitch deviants the smallest.
Word stress deviants elicited a characteristic double negativity, found in our earlier
studies. The results indicate that our multifeature paradigm could be effectively
utilized to elicit the MMN, and allows to apply the MMN as a potential biomarker for
assessing the phonological processing of children with possible reading disorders
in future studies.
