Individual differences in second language (L2) phoneme perception (within the normal population) have been related to speech perception abilities, also observed in the native language, in studies assessing the electrophysiological response mismatch negativity (MMN). Here, we investigate the brain oscillatory dynamics in the theta band, the spectral correlate of the MMN, that underpin success in...

Subtitling for the deaf and hard-of-hearing (SDH) is an area which deserves a special attention as it ena- bles these people to access to the part of the ‘world’ intended for hearing people, including the world of ‘motion pictures’, and particularly movie sounds. Compared to linguistic sounds, non-linguistic sounds have received little attention in the field of translation, although they are in...

We present a novel subliminal priming technique that operates in the auditory modality. Masking is achieved by hiding a spoken word within a stream of time-compressed speechlike sounds with similar spectral characteristics. Participants were unable to consciously identify the hidden words, yet reliable repetition priming was found. This effect was unaffected by a change in the speaker's voice a...

Whereas there is ample evidence for a role of the amygdala in the processing of visual emotional stimuli, particularly those with negative value, discrepant results have been reported regarding amygdala responses to emotional auditory stimuli. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate cerebral activity underlying processing of emotional nonlinguis...

We review the discovery, characterization, and evolving use of the N400, an event-related brain potential response linked to meaning processing. We describe the elicitation of N400s by an impressive range of stimulus types--including written, spoken, and signed words or pseudowords; drawings, photos, and videos of faces, objects, and actions; sounds; and mathematical symbols--and outline the se...

Although speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, some are perceptually weighted more than others and there are residual effects of native-language weightings in non-native speech perception. Recent research on nonlinguistic sound category learning suggests that the distribution characteristics of experienced sounds influence perceptual cue weights: Increasing variability ...

Vocal emblems, such as shh and brr, are speech sounds that have linguistic and nonlinguistic features; thus, it is unclear how they are processed in the brain. Five adult dextral individuals with left-brain damage and moderate-severe Wernicke's aphasia, five adult dextral individuals with right-brain damage, and five Controls participated in two tasks: (1) matching vocal emblems to photographs ...

A remarkable characteristic of the human nervous system is its ability to learn to integrate novel (foreign) complex sounds into words. However, the neural changes involved in how adults learn to integrate novel sounds into words and the associated individual differences are largely unknown. Unlike English, most languages of the world use pitch patterns to mark individual word meaning. We repor...

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (nazok) or thick (koloft). Differences in l...