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