Schedule of Events | Symposia

Examining the relationship between behavioral and neural indices of nonnative speech perception

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Meli R. Ayala¹ (aayala@udel.edu), Ali Solbi¹, F. Sayako Earle¹; ¹University of Delaware

Learning a foreign language often involves learning new speech sounds that are difficult to disambiguate, but learners can distinguish between foreign speech contrasts through speech-perceptual training. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between behavioral and neural indices of nonnative speech sound discrimination. Native speakers of English completed two days of training in the Hindi contrast of the dental and retroflex stops. They were assessed throughout the week on their discrimination accuracy and completed a passive oddball electroencephalogram (EEG) experiment at the end of the week. Event-related potentials (ERP) were analyzed to track learning-induced plasticity of the nonnative contrast for both within (dental1 vs. dental2) and between (dental vs. retroflex) category contrasts. A time window of 250-350ms post-stimulus onset was identified through visual inspection of the difference waveform (deviant minus standard) and mean amplitude was calculated during the window. A linear mixed effects model confirmed the presence of significant mismatch negativity (MMN) at central electrodes (Fz,FC1,C3,CP1,CP2,Cz,C4,FC2) for both deviants. We then tested the relationship between neural sensitivity recorded at electrode Cz and discrimination accuracy over time. A significant interaction between the within-category MMN and time suggested that the association between neural sensitivity and behavior grew stronger over the course of the week. The across-category MMN was unassociated with perceptual behavior. In summary, robust, neural sensitivity to nonnative speech was found to emerge with just two days of training. Furthermore, perceptual performance on nonnative speech discrimination may reflect phonetic, rather than category-level, sensitivities.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Audition