Premium
Selective tuning of cortical sound‐feature processing by language experience
Author(s) -
Tervaniemi M.,
Jacobsen T.,
Röttger S.,
Kujala T.,
Widmann A.,
Vainio M.,
Näätänen R.,
Schröger E.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2006.04752.x
Subject(s) - auditory cortex , contrast (vision) , duration (music) , feature (linguistics) , sound (geography) , psychology , speech sound , neural correlates of consciousness , first language , speech recognition , audiology , communication , linguistics , computer science , acoustics , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , cognition , medicine , philosophy , physics
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.