Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the impact of regional variation on phoneme perception

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 111; no. 3; pp. 390 - 396
• Main Authors: Brunellière, Angèle, Dufour, Sophie, Nguyen, Noël, Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.06.2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Auditory Perception; Biological and medical sciences; Cognitive science; Context Effect; Data Interpretation, Statistical; Differences; Electroencephalography; Event-related potentials; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Foreign Countries; France; French; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Language; Library and information sciences; Male; Mismatch negativity; Neuroscience; Perception; Phonemes; Phonological variation; Phonology; Physiology; Production and perception of spoken language; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Regional Characteristics; Regional disparities; Social behaviour; Speech; Speech Communication; Speech perception; Switzerland; Tests; Vowel; Young Adult; Switzerland; Event-related potentials; Mismatch negativity; Speech perception; Phonological variation; Human; Central nervous system; Stimulus disparity; Electrophysiology; Cognition; Verbal perception; Experimental study; Encephalon; Hearing; Language; Auditory evoked potential; Perception; Speech; Phonology; Behavior; Phoneme; Event evoked potential; Event-related Potentials; Mismatch Negativity
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.02.013

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/–/ε/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the /ø/–/y/ contrast, which is stable in all French-speaking regions. French-speaking participants from Switzerland for whom the /e/–/ε/ contrast is preserved, but who are exposed to different regional variants, had to perform a same-different task. They first heard four phonemically identical but acoustically different syllables (e.g., /be/–/be/–/be/–/be/), and then heard the test syllable which was either phonemically identical to (/be/) or phonemically different from (/bε/) the preceding context stimuli. The results showed that the unstable /e/–/ε/ contrast only induced a mismatch negativity (MMN), whereas the /ø/–/y/ contrast elicited both a MMN and electrophysiological differences on the P200. These findings were in line with the behavioral results in which responses were slower and more error-prone in the /e/–/ε/ deviant condition than in the /ø/–/y/ deviant condition. Together these findings suggest that the regional variability in the speech input to which listeners are exposed affects the perception of speech sounds in their own accent.