Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 26, Issue 3, 1 July 2005, Pages 703-720
NeuroImage

Effects of language experience: Neural commitment to language-specific auditory patterns

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.02.040Get rights and content

Abstract

Linguistic experience alters an individual's perception of speech. We here provide evidence of the effects of language experience at the neural level from two magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies that compare adult American and Japanese listeners' phonetic processing. The experimental stimuli were American English /ra/ and /la/ syllables, phonemic in English but not in Japanese. In Experiment 1, the control stimuli were /ba/ and /wa/ syllables, phonemic in both languages; in Experiment 2, they were non-speech replicas of /ra/ and /la/. The behavioral and neuromagnetic results showed that Japanese listeners were less sensitive to the phonemic /r–l/ difference than American listeners. Furthermore, processing non-native speech sounds recruited significantly greater brain resources in both hemispheres and required a significantly longer period of brain activation in two regions, the superior temporal area and the inferior parietal area. The control stimuli showed no significant differences except that the duration effect in the superior temporal cortex also applied to the non-speech replicas. We argue that early exposure to a particular language produces a “neural commitment” to the acoustic properties of that language and that this neural commitment interferes with foreign language processing, making it less efficient.

Section snippets

Methods

All experiments complied with the principles of research involving human subjects as stipulated by the University of Washington.

Methods

The identical procedure, equipment, and analysis methods of Experiment 1 were used. A subset of seven American listeners from Experiment 1 (3 females, 4 males) and a new group of eight Japanese listeners (age 22 ± 1, 3 females, 5 males) participated in the experiment. The experimental stimuli were the /ra–la/ syllables of Experiment 1. The control stimuli were non-speech analogs of the /ra/ and /la/ syllables, created by replacing the fundamental frequency and four formants with sinusoidal

General discussion

The two experiments in the present study demonstrate strong effects of language experience on speech perception. In both Experiments, Japanese listeners exhibit reduced sensitivity in discriminating American English /r–l/ (Fig. 1, Fig. 6 and Table 1, Table 2 for behavioral data; Fig. 3, Fig. 7 for MEG data). However, the results go beyond demonstrating this well-known difficulty. Our findings show that Japanese listeners not only have difficulty discriminating cross-boundary /r–l/ stimuli but

Acknowledgments

Funding was provided by NTT Communication Science Laboratories (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation), the NIH (HD 37954), the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, the Talaris Research Institute, and the Apex Foundation, the family foundation of Bruce and Jolene McCaw. We thank M. Kawakatsu for MRI scanning and D. Gammon for his assistance in data analysis. We also sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful questions and comments.

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    Currently, Human and Social Information Research Division, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, 101-8430, Japan.

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