Electrophysiological correlates of cross-linguistic speech perception in native English speakers

The present study examined the electrophysiological responses that Native E nglish speakers display during a passive oddball task when they are present ed with different types of syllabic contrasts, namely a labial /ba/-dental /da/, a Hindi dental /da/-retroflex /da/ and a within-category (two /ba/ to kens) contrasts. The analyses of the event-related potentials obtained show ed that subjects pre-attentively perceive the differences in all experiment al conditions, despite not showing such detection behaviourally in the Hind i and within-category conditions. These results support the notion that the re is no permanent loss of the initial perceptual abilities that humans hav e as infants, but that there is an important neural reorganisation which al lows the system to overcome the differences detected and only be aware of c ontrasts that are relevant in the language which will become the subjects n ative tongue. We also report order asymmetries in the ERP responses and sug gest that the percepts and not only the physical attributes of the stimuli have to be considered for the evaluation of the responses obtained. (C) 200 0 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.