Brain responses reveal the learning of foreign language phonemes

Learning to speak a new language requires the formation of recognition patt erns for the speech sounds specific to the newly acquired language. The pre sent study demonstrates the dynamic nature of cortical memory representatio ns for phonemes in adults by using the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-rela ted potential. We studied Hungarian and Finnish subjects, dividing the Hung arians into a naive (no knowledge of Finnish) and a fluent (in Finnish) gro up. We found that the MMN for a contrast between two Finnish phonemes was e licited in the fluent Hungarians but not in the naive Hungarians. This resu lt indicates that the fluent Hungarians developed cortical memory represent ations for the Finnish phoneme system that enabled them to preattentively c ategorize phonemes specific to this language.