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Updated: Jul 15, 2026

Combined Shuttle-Box Training with Electrophysiological Cortex Recording and Stimulation as a Tool to Study Perception and Learning
Published on: October 22, 2015
Selective tuning of cortical sound-feature processing by language experience
M Tervaniemi1, T Jacobsen, S Röttger
1Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, Finland. mari.tervaniemi@helsinki.fi
Abstract:
In 'quantity-languages', such as Japanese or Finnish, sound duration is linguistically relevant. We showed that quantity-language speakers were superior to speakers of a non-quantity language in discriminating the duration of even non-speech sounds. In contrast, there was no group difference in the discrimination of sound frequency. This result, obtained both by behavioural and neural indices at attentive and automatic levels of processing, indicates precise feature-specific tuning of the auditory-cortex functions by the mother tongue.
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