Central auditory processing of durational changes in complex speech patterns by newborns: An event-related brain potential study

In this study, newborns' ability to discriminate durational changes in the fricative /s/ within a nonsense word was investigated. The results showed t hat infrequent increments and decrements of a speech sound duration elicit a mismatch negativity kind of response in sleeping human newborns. In the a uditory event-related potential to these deviant stimuli two negative waves of this response were revealed. The first negative wave pecked at about 15 0 msec and the second at about 350 msec after the change onset. At least on e negative deflection, which was interpreted as evidence for stimulus chang e-detection, was observed in every infant.