Related Experiment Videos
Linguistic relevance of duration within the native language determines the accuracy of speech-sound duration
Sari Nenonen1, Anna Shestakova, Minna Huotilainen
1Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 9, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland. sari.nenonen@cbru.helsinki.fi
Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research
|April 23, 2003
Abstract:
As indexed by electrophysiological measures, in native speakers of a language with linguistically significant opposition between short and long phonemes, the pre-attentive detection accuracy of duration changes in speech sounds was tuned in comparison with that in non-speech sounds. This was not observed in advanced second-language users of the same language, suggesting that second-language acquisition does not lead to speech-specific tuning of the duration processing as does native language acquisition in early childhood.