Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 28, 2026
P50 Sensory Gating in Infants
Published on: December 26, 2013
Central auditory processing of durational changes in complex speech patterns by newborns: an event-related brain
E Kushnerenko1, M Cheour, R Ceponiene
1Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, P.O. Box 13, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. helen@avocado.pc.helsinki.fi
Abstract:
In this study, newborns' ability to discriminate durational changes in the fricative /s/ within a nonsense word was investigated. The results showed that infrequent increments and decrements of a speech sound duration elicit a mismatch negativity kind of response in sleeping human newborns. In the auditory event-related potential to these deviant stimuli two negative waves of this response were revealed. The first negative wave peaked at about 150 msec and the second at about 350 msec after the change onset. At least one negative deflection, which was interpreted as evidence for stimulus change-detection, was observed in every infant.
