0000000000214825
AUTHOR
Pihko E
Brain reacts to occasional changes in duration of elements in a continuous sound
In order to study the event-related potential correlates of human ability to detect temporal changes within a continuous sound a sound consisting of two alternating pitches of the same constant duration, with infrequent shortenings of one of the tones, was presented to the subjects. The infrequent shortenings were found to elicit a negative component of the auditory event related potential, called the mismatch negativity (MMN). The experimental parameters were chosen to produce a MMN with a minimal contamination of N1, the main negative deflection of an evoked response with the same latency range as MMN and with a short experimental time. The duration of the whole experiment with three diff…
Auditory event-related potentials (ERP) reflect temporal changes in speech stimuli
We studied the brain's reactions to deviations in the duration of a stop consonant using event-related potentials in an oddball paradigm. A naturally produced nonsense word was used as a frequent standard stimulus which differed from two infrequently presented deviant stimuli only by the duration of the silence period inside the stop, making the consonant sound longer. Evoked responses to the deviant stimuli showed sharply rising negativity after the unexpected prolongation of the silence and a later negativity, the duration of which was related to the timing of the beginning of the second part of the deviant sound. This later negativity is, at least partly, elicited by a mismatch process t…